


Forced Reflection

by Kizmet



Series: Chasing Ideal [6]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: And wrong, Civil War Team Iron Man, Eye Trauma, Gen, Historical References, Introspection, Not Steve Friendly, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pro-Accords, Steve Rogers is Stubborn, Suicide Attempt, in ch.7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-03 18:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8726392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizmet/pseuds/Kizmet
Summary: Interludes with the Anti-Accords Team while they try to figure out how things went so wrong.





	1. Belated Learning

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: While I was writing this story I had a particularly persistent Team!Cap supporter posting repeatedly on one of my other stories, who went from rude to obnoxious when I indicated a lack of interest in a debate under the terms of everything Steve says is gospel/everything Tony says is suspect and General Ross defined the Accords/T'Chaka's support of them is meaningless. Team!Cap in this story sort of ended up taking on a lot of this individual's POV and while this story introduced some side characters that are used later it didn't really take Team!Cap anywhere. 
> 
> I might try rewriting it someday.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Steve interlude. Learning history both global and personal opens up new perspectives.

For Steven Grant Rogers all his life had been a fight. Born sickly, he'd begun his life in a fight for survival against his own body. The Great Depression and a father lost to World War I meant getting necessities was a struggle throughout his childhood and there were always bullies trying to take what little he had or trying to build themselves up at his expense. And every time he failed Bucky was there to fight on his behalf. Then the war began and Steve had to fight to be allowed to fight, fight not to be left behind. He fought to save Bucky and succeeded. And then there was the war and HYDRA. He fought to save Bucky again and lost and was relieved to find an excuse to stop fighting - stop existing. Only he hadn't and when he woke up from the ice there was an alien invasion to fight and HYDRA. He fought Bucky and fought to save him and was left in limbo, not knowing if he'd succeeded or failed. And still there was HYDRA to fight then Ultron and HYDRA yet again. And then the world that had always needed him to fight, demanded that he fight, ordered him to stop and he fought that. He fought the world when it threatened Bucky. After the trial, after being sentenced Steve found himself with nothing left to fight for or to fight against, nothing to do except try to work out where everything went wrong.

He found himself drawing the fight with Tony over and over again, trying to get it out of his head, to make some sense out of what had happened by putting it on paper. Between his eidetic memory and the autopsy report General Ross gleefully presented him with there was very little about the fight that he couldn’t picture, couldn’t reproduce with startling clarity or in strange abstract when he tried to let his hands work through what he wasn’t seeing.

Steve was relatively certain he’d paired up every injury, every dent in the armor with a particular moment in the fight. Tony’s armor had been strong, it protected him from so much but it had also been compact, every cubic inch packed with circuitry and servos to control and power it. Once the armor finally gave it collapsed along the path of least resistance, into the pilot’s body. It was readily apparent in the pictures from the autopsy report, they’d had to cut the chest plate off of Tony’s body because it had been too compromised to release normally. In cross-section there was no way for Steve not to see that for every inch the edge of his shield had penetrated into the armor it had pressed the metal at least three-quarters of an inch into Tony’s ribs and lungs.

During the fight it hadn’t occurred to Steve to think about what was under the metal. As the fight escalated he’d all but forgotten that there was flesh and bone beneath the armor. If Tony’s face plate hadn’t broken free Steve couldn’t honestly swear to himself that he wouldn’t have taken Tony’s head clean off in those last few seconds of the fight. Whenever that thought surfaced in Steve's mind he would find himself drawing the aftermath of the fight, the part he hadn’t seen: Tony slowly dying as his broken ribs punctured his lungs and left him to suffocate, drowning in his own blood. ‘If I'd known, if I'd realized, if I'd checked- I was so worried about Bucky it didn't even occurred to me to make sure Tony was okay. He had been conscious and talking, defeated but still defiant, still angry, lashing out with his words, still trying to avenge his parents and that was good enough for me. I gave Tony his one last strike. I dropped the shield and walked away with Bucky, never once looking back even though the first thing any teammate, any friend of Tony’s, learned was to never trust Tony to tell you if he was hurt. I should have checked but I was so certain that FRIDAY would have help coming, that Tony was okay. How was I supposed to know that Vision would chose the Accords over Tony’s safety?’

Even after Sam, Clint and Scott joined him in his imprisonment Steve didn’t stop drawing. It was obvious, painfully obvious in retrospect, that he should have told Tony about his parents years ago. ‘If I’d told Tony Siberia never would have happened. Even if I wasn’t able to make Tony see reason, understand that it was HYDRA, not Bucky who was to blame for his parents’ murder Siberia still wouldn’t have happened. Either Tony would have refused to come out of hatred for Bucky or he would have decided to put aside their differences to face the threat of the Winter Soldiers before he came, either way Zemo’s scheme would have amounted to nothing if Tony had already known about his parents. I condemned us all when I chose to hide the truth. I should have listened to myself when I was berating Tony for keeping secrets. I should have told him.’ But there was something else, something about the fight itself that Steve just couldn’t get his head around and so he kept drawing it, filling multiple notebooks with macabra sketches. He knew that he was worrying Sam. The counselor believe his behavior was obsessive, there dwelling on Tony's death so much was unhealthy.

_“Councilor, this isn't post-traumatic stress and I'll thank you to step back,” Dr. Samson said, a small twitch of his jaw giving away frustration._

_“I let Wanda stagnant on one stage of her treatment and I think it made her problems worse in the long run,” Sam argued._

_“First you were too close to Ms. Maximoff to offer therapy and your relationship with Mr. Rogers is closer yet. As a professional you have a duty to recognize that and recuse yourself,” Samson said. “Second I'd like you to ask yourself if you have the training to offer psychiatric diagnoses.”_

_A faint flush colored Sam’s cheeks, “Vets were sent to my group after being diagnosed,” he admitted. “I was just trained in guiding them through group therapy. But the way Steve's fixating on Siberia…”_

_Steve shook his head, “Sam, killing Tony isn't a trauma I need to move past. It never should have happened and I need to understand why it did. Even if we weren't here I don't think I should be allowed in the field until I figure out how things went so wrong.”_

_“Where was that sort of thinking after Lagos?” Clint asked bitterly. “When you asked me to break Wanda out instead of leaving her to work out how she screwed up. Did you know she nearly broke Nat’s back at Leipzig? And she made me okay with that.”_

_“Mr. Barton,” Samson broke in, “Blaming Ms. Maximoff for your actions is counterproductive. She injured Agent Romanoff but if you were not bothered by that it comes from something in you. We have discussed her powers, analyzed all of your experiences with them: She could magnify or minimize your reactions to stimuli, she could dig up buried feelings but she could not create thoughts or feeling whole cloth.”_

_“Right. She made Nat getting hurt less important to me than it should have been. She made the part of me that resented Tony for being richer than Midas, rockstar famous and freaky smart to boot take over,” Clint said. “She did the same thing to Steve and that's what he’s refusing to see about why he killed Tony.”_

_“That's better,” Samson said dryly. “You stated what you disliked about Tony Stark rather than simply blaming Ms. Maximoff for your problems with him. If Mr. Rogers feels that there is something he still needs to work through about Siberia it is up to him to decide what that thing is. You can’t tell him the answer.”_

And so Steve kept drawing. As the days continued to pass with unrelenting sameness and purposelessness, he found himself drawing, reliving the fight against Bucky on the Helicarrier. Juxtaposing it with the fight in Siberia.

_“He’s my friend.”_

_“So was I.”_

Steve remembered the regret he’d felt that he had to fight Bucky. There had been so many lives at stake, he had to fight, had to win. He'd known Bucky’s mind wasn't his own that any attempt to reach him was likely doomed, Bucky hadn’t even remembered his own name, but he'd still had to try. Against Tony Steve knew he’d been angry. Betrayed and angry that Tony could attack someone who meant so much to him… And frustrated, frustrated about the whole thing: Why wouldn’t Tony just acknowledge he was right about the Accords and stop resisting him? Furious that Tony was betraying the team, him, by supporting the Accords instead of making them go away. Steve signed, at some level he was sure he'd known that Tony had been the one to fix things after Johannesburg, after Ultron and he’d counted on Tony to come through for them again after Lagos but Tony had abrogated his responsibility to the team, worse he’d gone against them, joined the enemy. In retrospect, Steve had to admit that Tony had been doing what he thought was right. It hadn’t been Tony’s intent to betray them, he hadn't just been being difficult, Tony had been doing what his conscious demanded. Steve had written as much in the letter Tony never read, but even as he’d written it Steve remembered wishing he could just shake Tony until he realized the truth. He remembered wondering how someone as smart as Tony could be so stupid as to think anything Thaddeus Ross supported could be the right thing to do.

Back when he’d been writing that letter Steve remembered telling himself that it was Tony’s lack of a military background making him confused him about the sacrifices necessary to get the job done. But after the trial, after Rhodes’ testimony Steve had to face that it wasn’t because Tony didn’t understand the realities of being a soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes hadn’t sided with Tony out of misplaced loyalty he chose his side in their dispute due to his convictions. Thinking about Rhodes led Steve to worrying about what was left of the Avengers trying to handle everything on their own while being hobbled by the Accords. Clint and Sam told him about Hope van Dyne and Carol Danvers stepping up to help deal with the situation in Sudan-

And Steve wanted to say that whole disaster was Ross’ fault for going after Wanda in the first place, but Samson objected to that as surely as he objected to blaming the whole disaster on Wanda’s powers. After what Ross had done to Samson Steve felt that they had to listen when he said that it didn’t matter that their distrust of Thaddeus Ross had been thoroughly justified and it didn’t matter if they’d been influenced to distrust Tony, because the Sokovia Accords were more than two individuals.

‘We should have focused on taking Ross down,’ Steve thought, ‘Why didn't Tony just tell us he was collecting evidence against him?’ But Tony couldn't answer now and Steve would never forgive himself for that. ‘And yet, and yet… Ross presenting the Accords made me more suspicious of them but that wasn't been the only reason I opposed them, was it? Would the idea of governments, countries, wanting to decide whether or not they wanted the Avengers’ help have sounded so sinister if Ross hadn't been the face of the government?

‘And now there was SHRA and proposed mandatory registration for anyone with powers. Everything that Foggy had said that made me wrong about the Accords seems to be true of SHRA. Doesn't that imply I was right to oppose the Accords? That they were the first step on a slippery slope?’

Samson told him that there was plenty of healthy debate around SHRA. In response Steve wondered how anyone could not see what a terrible thing SHRA was. How was debate healthy when the problems were so glaringly obvious that everyone with any sense should be able to see them. And Samson handed him a stack of reading on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s.

One of the things that had most impressed Steve about the future he’d woken up in were the strides toward equality. The Commandos had been a racially integrated unit but they’d been the exception as they’d been formed from the surviving POW’s of a number of different units rescued by Steve, Peggy and Howard along with Bucky in ‘43. Within the Commandos, the time they’d spent as prisoners of HYDRA had broken down racial barriers. During their campaign against HYDRA the Commandos had mostly stuck to themselves. On those few occasions where they’d worked closely enough with other units for racism to become an issue a stern look from Steve had generally been enough to silence any objections to Gabe, Happy or Jim. And if not a less than friendly word from Bucky and Dum Dum did the trick. As for Peggy, Steve knew she’d had to prove herself twice over what any male would have, it wasn’t fair but she’d been more than up to the task.

Being in the Commandos first hand experience made it obvious that racial prejudices were just so much nonsense. It was a surprising for Steve to read about how long it had taken for the rest of the country to catch on to that fact. To read about how much work, perseverance and suffering had gone into fixing the bad laws that had existed in his tie and creating new ones to… Well, to serve the same purpose as those private talks with Bucky and Dum Dum: To encourage the necessary changes for people or societies who proved unwilling to do it simply because of principle.

It was while Steve was reading up on the Civil Rights movement that the first anonymous package turned up in his cell. That first nondescript little package contained pictures of Gabe Jones and his three daughters participating in the Civil Rights movement’s March on Washington along with notes of how all the former Commandos and their families had been involved from Howard Stark’s donations of money to Happy Sawyer’s arrest while participating in Freedom Rides in ‘61. Since coming out of the ice, Steve had been reluctant to learn what had become of the people he’d known. It hurt seeing Peggy so feeble, her indomitable will blunted by Alzheimer's, and so he hadn’t tried to find out about any of the others. But now, reading about what the Commandos had helped to accomplish after the war, it made him feel a little more tied to the history that had passed him by.

When the history lessons moved on to the Vietnam War, what Steve learned about his former team was more painful. The Commandos had been intensely proud of their military service, several had turned career military after the war ended and the youngest of those were highly ranked officers when Vietnam started. The rest had raised their children on stories of their adventures; too many of the Commandos’ children had volunteered to go to Vietnam and hadn't come home. By ‘68 the Vietnam War had divided the Commandos almost as emphatically as the Accords had the Avengers. And just learning about it after the Avengers’ Civil War ended up putting Steve and the newly thawed Bucky Barnes at odds.

_“The US had no goddamn business being there in the first place,” Bucky said without the slightest doubt as he and Steve’s weekly phone call turned to their history lessons. “Trying to force your ways on people who don’t want them always ends up causing more problems than it solves.”_

_“The next thing I know, you’re going to be saying the Accords were right,” Steve snapped._

_“Just ‘cause I got caught in Zemo’s crossfire doesn’t make them wrong.”_

_“What do expect?” Foggy asked when he came to visit several days later. “Bucky’s learning world history from a nation so isolationist that they make Japan’s Tokugawa Period look like a step toward globalization. Of course he’s going to end up thinking non-interference is the Holy Grail. Different cultures, different viewpoints. It’s not all black and white.”_

Steve read with growing disquiet as the anonymous packages told how Howard, always one of their staunchest allies but never quite one of the Commandos, had been demonized by both factions as the war dragged on. Those who came to oppose the war savaged Howard for making money off it while those who continued to support it criticized him for failing to make weapons that would end it. Steve found himself looking at a death certificate for Terrence Dugan, age nineteen, killed in 1964 when a US bomber cell dropped their payload early. Eight days later Dum Dum was arrested for assaulting Howard Stark. Howard had tried to get the charges dropped and when that didn't work he testified, the judge dismissed the case and Howard spent the night in jail for contempt of court. With everything laid out in black and white it was easy to see how Howard had manipulated the judge and the trial to protect Dum Dum but Steve wondered if anyone one had seen it back then.

Gradually, as the war became interminable and the casualties continuing to mount while nothing was accomplished, most of the Commandos became aligned against it but it was years after the official ceasefire had been declared before the rift between the Commandos was repaired. From what Steve could deduce, the rift never healed when it came to Howard, too much pride on his side and no one who bothered to reach out from the other side. After Vietnam Peggy was the only member of the Commandos Howard ever spoke to again and even their relationship was strained. Steve wondered if Ultron would have become that for them if the Accords hadn't happened, he wonder if Tony would have just continued to drift further and further away until there was no way for either of them to bridge the divide.

The next package was different in tone from those that preceded it, it wasn’t about anything Steve’s former team had done to shape world events than Howard’s personal life set against the tapestry of the world. A series of medical records with the dates highlighted to draw attention to the fact that Howard’s wife had suffered a series of miscarriages blamed on stress and a nervous disposition as the Vietnam War escalated. The medical records culminated in an arrest report for an anti-war protester who’d broken into Howard and Maria Stark’s home followed hours later by a birth certificate for one Evelyn Stark and then a death certificate. After five failed attempts Howard and Maria finally had a child, but Tony’s older sister was born nearly two months prematurely and died only two days after her birth. During the year following Evelyn Stark’s death Stark Industries had produced a number of weapons crueler and more destructive than anything they’d ever sold before.

That same packet contained letters between Howard and a number of different generals written between 1955 and 1968, over the years Howard’s sales pitch went from promising the ‘best’ military to the ‘strongest’ and in the year after his first child’s death, Howard offered them the technology to create the ‘most fearsome’ military in the world. In some ways Howard’s response seemed to Steve like an angry ‘fuck you’ to the people who’d demanded he quit making weapons but reading between the lines he could also hear Howard telling the people who demanded better weapons from him: “Take what you want. Do with it what you will. Just don’t come crying to me afterwards,” and it wasn’t in tones of disinterest but out of active spite as if his daughter’s death had set loose a vengeful genie in Howard Stark. In those letters Steve saw the Howard he'd known turn into the father Tony had never wanted to talk about. There was also a footnote that Obadiah Stane joined Stark Industries a few months after Evelyn Stark’s death.

Then in ‘69 Maria Stark got pregnant for a sixth time and Howard changed again as the pregnancy progressed without trauma and Anthony Edward Stark was born May 29th, 1970. New weapon developments from SI trailed off and Howard’s name all but disappeared from the company’s patent disclosures. Steve wanted to tell himself that time had healed Howard’s wounds but a spreadsheet included in the new packet told a different story. It showed a yearly breakdown of the time and money Howard put into his efforts to recover Captain America from the ice. Steve felt a combination of guilt- “My dad made that shield”- and warmth at seeing in black and white that Howard had never give up on finding him. From 1946, after the government’s official search had been called off, until 1968 Howard had kept the search alive but in 1969 it turned into an obsession. Howard’s expenditures on the project leapt up sharply and would continue to rise until his death. Steve was shocked to see that during the last five years of his life Howard Stark had spent more on his search than Tony would spend financing the Avengers after S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fall and that Howard had personally overseen the search from May to September year after year.

The next package to appear in Steve’s cell was nothing more than a manila envelope containing a faded picture and an old letter. Steve instantly recognized Peggy’s handwriting on the letter:

> Dear Edwin, Peggy wrote.
> 
> I’m so glad you let me know about Tony’s graduation. I’ll make sure Howard gets the video. Even though he won’t say, I know he wishes he’d been there. Try to make Tony understand that he is important to his father, even if Howard is horrible at showing it. Sometimes I wonder if Fennoff’s hypnotism had a deeper impact than we ever realized because I can’t believe that it’s really Steve that Howard is searching for after so many years. I think he’s searching for redemption… Although even I won’t say as much. Why would Howard think he needs redemption? He didn’t do anything wrong, or he won’t admit he has any regrets and it’s not worth the skin on my nose to suggest otherwise. Enough of that. If I dwell on it too long I will end up in another pointless fight with the man.
> 
> On to things that might be resolvable: When I give Howard the video I’ll do my best to explain the black eye so that Tony doesn’t get a lecture about it next fall. However you didn’t ask for my intervention with Howard, still I don’t know what advice to give you for Tony. While it would certainly make his life easier if he would learn to be a bit quieter about his intelligence I can’t bring myself to say that to him. It too closely echoes me being told to play down my abilities if I didn’t want to end up a spinster. I was fortunate enough to meet two men who didn’t need me to be less than I was to feel good about themselves and I have to believe that Tony will also be better off with friends who don’t require him to hide the depth of his brilliance to like him.
> 
> That said, while I’m glad to know Tony hasn’t knuckled under to the bullies who have made high school so miserable for him, he might have gone a bit far… His speech as valedictorian was quite obviously not the one his teachers approved. As to your concern, I don't expect any attempts to sue Tony for slander, I think the parents would rather not risk additional attention drawn to Tony’s assertions, or risk the possibility that Tony might be able to produce proof if pressed. But you should keep an eye out for any attempts at retaliation from the pair who weren’t arrested for assault on the spot. They’re obviously much brighter than the ones who tried attacking Tony in front of me and thus more dangerous.
> 
> As for Howard, Tony is hardly going to amenable to having the whole thing raked up again months after the fact and I don’t blame him for that. You deal with Tony’s infractions now and I’ll make sure Howard doesn’t stick his nose in when he gets back to the States in September. I’ll tell him that Tony won the fight, sadly, that will probably be enough to keep him from harping on it as long as I don’t mention that by ‘won’ I mean Tony induced the majority of his tormentors to attack him in front of witnesses for once and they’re facing legal proceedings. How Howard expects Tony to win at fisticuffs with boys who have six years and an average of fifty pounds on him I do not know!
> 
> Before you ask, yes I could teach Tony enough to beat-up untrained high schoolers despite the handicap of his age, but I won’t. You can’t possibly deny that Tony lacks the good sense to know when NOT to pick fights. If I teach him the dirty tricks he’d need against those brutes he’d use them the next time he was kidnapped and odds are I’d end up retrieving a body. Tony needs to learn that sometimes the cost of fighting is just too high to be born and he needs to learn that sooner rather than later.

Steve set the letter down and started laughing until he was choking. “Make up your mind Peg,” he whispered when he regained control. “Do we stand fast no matter the forces arrayed against us because we’re right? Or do we count the cost and choose our battles accordingly?”

He set the letter aside and turned over the picture. Tony was ridiculously young and tiny in his high school mortarboard and gown. From the date, Tony was a few weeks past his thirteenth birthday but he was small for his age. The graduation picture also captured his much older and larger classmates’ dark glares. Steve cringed to picture those same teenagers attacking the child Tony had been probably only moments after that picture had been taken. For Steve it was almost unreal, seeing Tony as the smallest and weakest of a group, not when Steve was used to watching Tony effortlessly work a crowd, shifting their mood, their view of the world with little more than his personal charisma. But then Steve supposed it wasn't easy to see the small, sickly Brooklyn boy he'd been either.

A few days later when Steve found himself drawing Siberia yet again he stopped after a few minutes he flipped to a clean sheet and started drawing the fight again, this time trying to draw it as it might have appeared from Tony’s point of view.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My take on Howard is strongly influenced by season 1 of "Agent Carter" and I wanted to put some sort of reason to Tony being born when Howard is over 50 (beyond Marvel never knows how to detach characters from WWII).


	2. A Negative Example

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Clint interlude. There are things he would rather be blind to (or an excuse to pick at the team's reasoning in AoU).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The response to the earlier chapter convinced me that I should continue this series. However rather than the chapters being arranged in chronological order they’re going to be centered on a particular character. I want to do one for each member of Team!Cap and ending with revisiting Steve. Like with the “Nettie” stories these are side stories where I don’t have any writing schedule that I’m trying to maintain.

Clint looked away when he saw Steve sitting in the patch of sunlight from the skylight over the common area between their cells with his sketchbook. He didn’t want to see another gruesome image of Tony dying, didn’t want to see the violence in Steve’s head scrawled across the paper in black and white. Captain America was supposed to be better than that, better than him. 

“I never was much of a friend to Tony,” Steve said without looking up from his drawing pad.

Clint remembered evenings in the Tower during their push to take HYDRA down once and for all. He and Tony riling Steve up for no reason other than because it was easy then Steve suddenly grinning at them and the two of them realizing he’d been putting them on the whole time. “We had good times. We were a great team until-” Clint bit his tongue before he could say, “until Tony made his damned murder-bot.” 

_Clint balanced his chair on two legs with uncanny ease as he watched Dr. Samson with a look of pointed disinterest. “Am I supposed to talk about what I hated about Tony some more and how it’s NOT Wanda’s fault I barely felt anything when I found out he died?”_

_“Or we could talk about your family,” Samson suggested._

_“‘Cause it’s a load of crap,” Clint continued ignoring Samson. “I liked Tony, we had fun, before Ultron.” He shrugged eloquently, “It was a surprise, yeah. I mean Tony Stark was like a real live American success story: Born in the top ten percent, climbed to the top one percent, sleeps with models and actresses by scores… But Tony could be, well, normal for an overgrown teenager but who am I to talk? Maybe it freaked me out a little when I walked into the kitchen and found Tony Stark of Stark Industries in a three piece suit that cost more than my yearly salary talking with Pepper in figures that make Monopoly money look penny-ante. But then there was Tony in a ratty old band shirt and jeans sitting up all night playing video games with me because both of us made insomnia a lifestyle._

_“I had this old Atari system that I’d been dragging around since ‘84. It was busted but it had been a joint Christmas present for my brother and I from one of the few years that my family actually celebrated. When I unpacked it, Tony got all misty- eyed. He fixed it up so it ran better than new and spent thirteen hours straight getting beaten at Pong, because fuck, nobody beats me at hand-eye coordination. I don’t know how long he would have kept trying if Nat hadn’t pulled the plug on us,” a small smile brightened Clint’s face. “You can’t say it was all on me that I forgot that Tony until Vision took Wanda’s powers.”_

_“You said that was before Ultron,” Samson reminded him._

_“Of course it was different after Tony built that thing,” Clint said. “I mean, I know he meant for Ultron to be a good thing and yeah, Wanda gave him some nightmares but thousands of people died because of something Tony built.”_

_Samson looked curious, “How is what Ms. Maximoff did to Dr. Stark different than what she did to you?”_

_Clint let his chair slam down on all legs as he looked away._

_“Maybe we should talk more about Ms. Maximoff’s powers as a group,” Samson said. “After all, I don’t have any direct experience with them.”_

* * *

_“Let me check my understanding of Ms. Maximoff’s powers,” Samson said after discussing them with Vision and having the renegade Avengers explain their experiences training with her and having her powers used on them. “Ms. Maximoff cannot usurp a person’s will. She cannot put thoughts or feelings in your head that didn’t exist there to start with. What she can do is affect the intensity of emotions in those she uses her powers against. She can dig up buried fears and make them so overwhelming that the victim loses connection with reality while under their effect. This has been personally experienced as an attack by all the Avengers, excluding Mr. Barton, at the time of the Ultron Crisis and as a training exercise by Mr. Barton and all those Avengers who were Ms. Maximoff’s teammates after Ultron. It is suspected that she can also intensify emotions apart from fear, due to the Avengers’ easy acceptance of her after Ultron, despite her past association with HYDRA. Alternately Ms. Maximoff’s powers can be used to reduce the intensity of a person’s emotions, this has been demonstrated when she used her powers on captured HYDRA agents to minimize their loyalty to HYDRA before they were interrogated, is this correct?”_

_“I just asked Wanda to de-program them,” Steve said defensively._

_“But is this a good description of her abilities?” Samson asked._

_“Yeah,” Clint said reluctantly. “She’s not Loki. When he used the scepter on me, all that mattered was his master’s ‘Grand Purpose’, I didn’t even really know what it was but it was so important, I was so sure it was good, essential, that I turned on my friends, my people. I was ready to die to carry out Loki’s orders and afterwards I couldn’t have told you what that purpose was beyond the conviction that it was ‘grand’. Wanda might not be capable of that, but her powers are insidious. Once I was free of Loki’s powers there was no doubt about what he made me do. Even knowing she made me like her and dislike Tony, I don’t know where my reaction to Tony making Ultron ended and Wanda’s manipulation began.”_

_Clint glared at Samson, “You've yammered on and on about what problems I had with Tony. Well, guess what? I was mad that Tony made a fucking murder-bot. His goddamn creation put us in the position of having to choose to sacrifice a city to save the world. Thousands of people died because of something Tony made, the only reason I didn't die was because a stupid kid put himself between me and a hail of bullets. The Avengers were something great, we were doing something unquestionably good and Tony tarnished that ‘cause he just had to mess with that damned scepter, like anything good could come from it.”_

_Steve nodded sadly._

_“Ultron was a screw-up, of monumental proportions but it wasn’t something Tony planned and I knew that,” Clint continued. “I should have gotten over being mad at him, but I didn't... Until Wanda lost her powers, so don't tell me it's my fault. Without her I would have gotten over it while Tony was still alive. And I don’t even know what else she screwed with in my head.”_

_“Tony tried to talk with me after Bucharest about the Accords, about amending them, about getting Bucky help and making Sam and I’s arrest go away,” Steve said reluctantly. Remembering what Foggy Nelson had said he added, “If I’d trusted Tony more I would have listened to him. But the thought of him keeping Wanda locked up at the compound was so bad that I just shut him out after hearing that.”_

_“So you hold Ms. Maximoff responsible for the Avengers’ refusal to support Dr. Stark after Ultron, up to and including your refusal to consider working with him on the Sokovia Accords?” Samson asked._

_Sam, Clint and Scott nodded immediately. Steve sighed, “The Accords maybe but I haven’t trusted anyone with Bucky’s safety since the US military wrote him off back in ‘43.”_

_“So you don’t believe Wanda’s powers had anything to do with your decision to go to Bucharest after Ms. Romanov asked you to trust herself and Dr. Stark to deal with the situations?” Samson asked. “But you do think her powers might have been a factor in your decision not to accept Dr. Stark’s offer in Berlin?”_

_“Pretty much,” Steve agreed._

_“And you also believe that the creation of Ultron was Dr. Stark’s fault, despite Ms. Maximoff using her powers against him during your first mission in Sokovia?” Samson asked._

_Clint and Steve nodded in firm agreement, after a moment Scott followed suit._

_“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I had to bow out of the team exercises with Wanda because she was tearing apart all the work I’d done to get my PTSD under control. She did the same thing to Stark and he didn’t get the option of telling her to stop, he didn’t even know it was an external attack. Maybe Wanda didn’t know exactly how Stark was going to react but… If she had him under then she could have taken Loki’s scepter back. She made the choice to leave it in his hands after using her powers to trigger his fears. I- I can’t convince myself that it’s any different than if she’d taken one of my guys at the VA, shoved a gun in their hands then turned on a recording of a fire-fight. We don’t blame Dr. Banner for Johannesburg.”_

_“That was different,” Clint argued. “Bruce was out of his head. Anyone who not living under a rock knows triggering the Hulk is no different from setting off a bomb. We SHOULD have come down on Wanda like a bag of anvils for that but we didn’t because she was messing with us.”_

_“How is it different?” Samson asked._

_“Tony was in control,” Clint said. “You don’t build a murder-bot in a blind panic, hell there’s only a bare handful of people in the world who could build something like Ultron at all. You can’t convince me that making something like that was just a reaction to Wanda triggering him. Tony thought it through and decided that building Ultron was a good idea.”_

_“He didn’t mean for Ultron to turn out like that,” Steve protested. “It was supposed to protect humanity but Ultron looked at all the ugliness in the world and decided to kill us instead. Wanda said there was something broken in Tony that made it turn out like it did.”_

_“Wanda said,” Clint put in. “And naturally we believed her, not.”_

_“Hal. V’ger. Skynet,” Scott ticked off. “It’s not that hard to predict that if you make a machine think it’s going to try to kill all us humans.”_

_“Rhodes told us Stark’s been making AI’s since he was a teenager and Ultron’s the only one that ever went crazy,” Sam sighed. “That does point to Ultron going bad was because Stark’s PTSD was driving Ultron’s creation.”_

_“And I thought we weren’t supposed to blame Wanda,” Clint said with a smug look in Samson’s direction._

_“Tony still should have told us what he was up to,” Steve said. “I know I don’t have any room to talk, I should have told him about his parents, but my mistake doesn’t excuse Tony’s.”_

_“The information about the murder of Dr. Stark’s parents was personal information, directly relating to him,” Samson pointed out. “Was it normal procedure for the Avengers to review every project that Doctors Stark and Banner worked on? You've told me in the past that it was normal for members of the team to work solo or in smaller groups on things like searching for Sergeant Barnes or smaller missions. As I understood it, Dr. Stark never involved the Avengers when it came to dealing with the negative legacy of his company.”_

_“Stark bombs were his problem,” Clint said flatly. “He made ‘em. He let the bad guys get ahold of them. He let people die because he was too busy making money off of blood. He can clean ‘em up.”_

_“Clint,” Steve said uncomfortably. “We would have lost WWII without Howard’s weapons. SI was arming about twenty percent of the US troops and sixty percent of our planes, not just the Commandos. I got a pretty pointed lecture about taking him into combat scenarios ‘cause of that fact even if Colonel Phillips couldn’t formally reprimand me without doing a lot of damage to morale. Tony thought he was doing the same thing. But Ultron? He was trying to win a war no one was fighting, once you start doing that then that war becomes inevitable.”_

_“Even after Ultron it wasn’t normal for Stark to review his projects with the Avengers beforehand,” Sam said. “I had no idea Stark knew that the team needed a more discreet scout, let alone that he was working on the problem. I can’t say I complained about it either. Redwing wasn’t just useful; he was, totally saved our asses more than once-”_

_“We were used to having your eyes on the situation,” Steve said turning to Clint. “Right after you retired we had a couple close calls due to things you would have seen and warned us about. I don’t know if Natasha or Rhodes talked to Tony about it but one day there was a box on Sam’s bed with Redwing and notes on how he worked. It solved the problem.”_

_“And the longer I had him the more he was like a pet,” Sam said. “I know he was just a machine but I swear he liked me. I hope Rhodes or someone took him back, that he’s not just locked up in a dark closet somewhere.”_

_“Redwing’s another Stark AI?” Scott asked in alarm._

_Sam’s mouth sagged opened, “Seriously? You think Stark made a new AI after Ultron?”_

_“Redwing did sort of remind me of Tony’s helper bots,” Steve admitted. “They were really limited, I mean they didn’t have access to Iron Man’s systems and couldn’t talk like J.A.R.V.I.S., but um, I caught Dum-E trying to pester Tony into playing with him more than once. They weren’t just machines.”_

_“Dummy?” Samson asked._

_“You know that robot Tony made while he was in college?” Clint asked, “The one that got mentioned in the TV biography about him that came out right before he got kidnapped? That was Dum-E. Tony was always complaining about the stuff he screwed up but he never turned him off or restricted Dum-E’s lab access, Tony even recovered Dum-E and the other bots from the ocean after the Mandarin blew-up his Malibu house.”_

_“You think I could contact Rhodes?” Sam said. “Ask about Redwing?”_

_“If Dr. Stark was as attached to his AI’s as you’ve suggested, it probably wouldn’t go amiss to let Colonel Rhodes know that you’re concerned about the one he gave to you,” Samson said. Then couldn’t help but ask, “They’re true AI’s? Truly intelligent, thinking beings?”_

_“Yes,” Clint and Steve answered without hesitation. “For months after we moved into the Tower, I thought Tony was having me on about J.A.R.V.I.S. being a machine. I was convinced he had someone hidden somewhere talking on the PA to us. FRIDAY’s a nice gal but I always sort of missed J.A.R.V.I.S.” Steve added, causing an uncomfortable silence as they thought about how much more Tony must have missed J.A.R.V.I.S. and hurt after his destruction._

_“Tony and Bruce didn’t tell the team about a lot of the stuff they worked on,” Steve said as if to change the subject. “I didn’t even know about their ‘Veronica’ contingency until Johannesburg or about half the upgrades Tony sprung on us.”_

_Clint snorted, “If you tried to tell Tony about a specific upgrade you wanted he'd get all huffy then go off and do it some other way and rub your nose in it for weeks when his idea was better. ‘Leave the engineering to the engineer.’ he’d say.”_

_“Could we come back to that statement?” Samson asked. “But first, does everyone agree that both before and after Ultron it was normal for Dr. Stark to develop things for the Avengers without consulting you?”_

_“He might have talked to Bruce, they kept each other up to date about their respective research projects,” Steve said. “He was working with Bruce on Ultron, I’d forgotten that.”_

_“But not to the team as a whole?”_

_“Trying to awe us with the cool stuff he made was half the fun for Tony,” Clint said. “Giving us a heads up while he was still in the design stage would have messed with that.”_

_“It was normal, accepted procedure for Dr. Stark to maintain a level of secrecy around his projects until he was ready to unveil them?” Samson pressed and got a round of nods. “It’s my understanding that Ultron activated prematurely? Dr. Stark was not ready to bring the AI on line?”_

_“No one actually knows how Ultron got activated,” Steve admitted. “Bruce and Tony both said they were only studying the scepter.”_

_“So Dr. Stark did not deviate from practices commonly accepted by the team. You don’t blame him for Ultron because he ignored normal precautions around his research but because the normal, accepted precautions failed,” Dr. Samson stated._

_“After Lagos we were all upset because we couldn't have predicted Rumlow rigging himself with a bomb, we'd run dozens of missions like that and no one had a problem with it until something we couldn't have predicted went wrong. But we did the exact same thing to Tony after Ultron didn’t we?” Sam realized._

_Samson let Sam’s statement hang in the air for a long moment._

_“At several points you mentioned that it was typical for doctors Stark and Banner to consult one another about their research but not the whole team. Why do you think that might be?” Samson asked._

_“I’d practically fall asleep when Tony started in on what he'd done to my arrows,” Clint said._

_To everyone's surprise Scott snorted, “You didn't care how much trouble he'd gone to getting it to work, all you were interested in was that it worked so well that you never had to think about it.” At the looks he was receiving Scott rolled his eyes, “I'm an engineer too,” he pointed out. “I lived through that stupid ‘Designed by engineers, used by REAL people’ ad campaign.”_

_“I couldn't understand half of what Tony said,” Steve said, “and it wasn't just the pop culture references. It was the same when Howard got on about one of his gadgets.”_

_Scott shrugged, “Why would you? I read the history books: You studied art before you went into the military. You got through basic training then they gave you the serum and that’s pretty much the end of your training. Then you rescued those guys from HYDRA and the government acknowledged how good you were at leading but even in World War II, you weren’t the tech guy. Who’d expect you to be able to follow Tony Stark’s research?” Scott glanced at the floor and mumbled, “I wouldn’t have asked you to look over my research either. Hank or Hope sure, but Captain America or not you wouldn’t have had a clue as to what you were looking at. You’re just not qualified to judge my work as an engineer.”_

_“And the UN’s not qualified to judge where the Avengers are needed!” Steve said a look of pure relief filling his face. “We were wrong to demand that Tony let us make decisions about what he should investigate as an engineer but he believed us when we told him that he SHOULD have brought Ultron to us first. So when Ross came to him with the Accords, Tony agreed with them because of the way we’d acted, we’d TOLD him that was right! Only how we reacted to Ultron was wrong. Tony must have been so confused when we refused to sign the Accords,” he finished regretfully._

_Dr. Samson stared at Steve in disbelief, “You honestly believe the UN and the governments of the countries where the Avengers want to operate lack the background to understand the threat posed by terrorists like Brock Rumlow or of an alien invasion like the Chitauri?” He rubbed his temples, “We’ll talk more about that later. I'm not ready to address this right now.”_

_“The problem wasn't Tony doing his projects without talking to us or Tony's AI’s or what he wanted Ultron to be,” Clint snapped. “The problem was that goddamned scepter! He never should have touched it! That thing and the Tesseract nothing good ever came from humans messing with that crap!”_

_“Vision,” Sam said under his breath._

_“Well Thor was involved then wasn't he?” Clint demanded._

“Maybe we were wrong to blame Tony for Ultron, still it was good back then. We trusted each other before that mess,” Clint said, begging Steve to agree with him. 

“Natasha and I learned about Tony’s parents when S.H.I.E.L.D. fell,” Steve said dully. 

Clint shook his head in denial. 

Steve looked up, obviously forcing himself to meet Clint’s eyes squarely. “I was lying to Tony about his parents the whole time we were living at the Tower.”

“Why?” Clint demanded.

“I was scared, selfish,” Steve admitted. “I didn’t know for sure it was Bucky but I knew it wasn’t an accident that they died. I didn’t want to deal with Tony being hurt or angry so I just… took the easy way out, said nothing.”

“You were supposed to be better than that,” Clint accused getting into Steve’s space.

“Well I’m not,” Steve snapped, “How many times do I have to tell everyone that?”

“Right, you’re just a guy from Brooklyn,” Clint said sarcastically.

“That's right,” Steve didn't back down.

“You don't get to be that anymore, Captain America carries too much weight for you pretend you're just a guy.”

“This thing you made of me while I was in the ice, I was never that,” Steve exclaimed, his voice rising steadily. “Since I woke up I've been trying to live up to that fiction, because you all needed that. Even Tony, even when he was challenging me, was using me as a barometer of what's right. Every moment, every day you needed me to have the right answers and I have tried! But I was never more than just a man.”

Suddenly instead of Captain America, Clint was seeing the sickly kid everyone had dismissed without a second thought. He was seeing the USO ‘dancing monkey’, propaganda symbol or lab rat, either way his value had been reduced to his physical body not the person he'd been. He was seeing the barely trained, twenty-five year old with no combat experience who’d gotten a field promotion to captain and a unit to lead because he’d decided to go AWOL and rescue his best friend, ignoring all other considerations. 

‘He was younger than Wanda when they promoted him.’ Clint’s skin crawled when he suddenly found himself looking at a kid who’d been pretending, for years, that he had all the answers because everyone expected that of him and who was scared stiff of what might happen if he ever admitted to not knowing. ‘If Steve can be wrong, what have I been doing all this time?’

* * *

_A Month Later_

Clint stared through the glass in the visiting room feeling like he’d been punched in the gut. It had been more than two years since he’d seen his son and the pre-teen he’d known had grown into a gangly, sharp-eyed adolescent. 

In a daze Clint walked across the room and picked up the phone. “I’m sorry,” he said before Cooper could say anything. “I never should have hit you. I just- I was having a lousy day then I saw you with one of my explosives in your hand and I was scared. I wanted it away from you as quickly as possible and I didn’t stop to think that the quickest way I could see to disarm you wasn’t anything I should ever do to my own kid.”

“Mom was mad at me too, once I told her everything that happened,” Cooper replied, his tone cold. “She grounded me for three months, starting from whenever we weren’t too scared to leave the house. Do you know what it was like after you guys murdered Tony Stark and crippled Colonel Rhodes? That first month everyone was taking sides and- and a lot of times it’d turn violent, we saw it on the news every day. Why should normal people talk things out like grown-ups when the Avengers were tearing each other apart? 

“Mom was scared someone from town would realize who you were. Even after it settled back down she was still scared,” Cooper informed his father. “Mr. Coulson moved us somewhere new, somewhere no one would connect us to you. I miss my old friends, I can’t even write or call in case it clues someone in as to where we went.”

“I’m sorry,” Clint repeated. “I didn’t think it would turn out like that. I- I know the Accords didn’t turn out as bad as we thought they’d be and the Winter Soldiers didn’t end up being a threat but-”

“You thought the world was making a stupid, dangerous choice so you decided you’d go and hit people until they wised up and did it your way,” Cooper interrupted.

“Okay,” Clint said quietly. “Maybe I deserved that, but did you have a reason for coming beyond not accepting that I am sorry about what happened?”

“Mom said you might come home soon,” Cooper said. “I thought seeing you, maybe I could make up my mind if I wanted you to or not, ‘cause it’s driving me crazy. Lila’s all happy and Nate doesn’t have a clue who you are. And I don’t know. What if people recognize you? Will we have to move again?”

“Coulson knows what he’s doing and I know how to keep a cover,” Clint said. “If he tells me it’s not safe for you if I’m recognized I won’t be recognized.”

“What if I just don’t want anyone to know you’re my dad?” Cooper asked. “There was a girl in my class who turn out to have the Inhuman gene, she got powers last week. She was lucky, nothing bad happened when her powers manifested. But the teachers took her away and I was worried that maybe she’d get in trouble or someone would hurt her. There’s a vent in the gym that you can use to spy on the principal's office. I heard them talking to her. Captain America and the rest of you guys are the cautionary story: Look at them. See, it doesn’t matter who you are. You go all cowboy people are going to end up dying because of you. You’re not above the law.” 

“What happened to her?” Clint asked trying to sound casual. In the past few years he and the other former Avengers had seen too many unlucky kids pass through, ending up spending a few days or even a week in the high security prison simply because they’d scared someone when their powers manifested. Put there not because of what they’d done but because no one trusted any other jail to contain them. Steve had objected once and was told, “We put you in a conference room the first time you were arrested. Half and hour later you decided you had other places to be… And here we are: Tony Stark dead, Colonel Rhodes crippled and a destroyed airport later. All because we trusted Captain America to respect the law.” It wasn’t right or fair that other people with powers were suffering by association but it saying that it wasn’t right didn’t erase the sting of knowing that their actions that had helped to create the situation.

Cooper shrugged, “They called her parents, called the Avengers. Colonel Rhodes and Captain Marvel came within the hour, they talked to her about their school. They said she should come out to their school so they could test her powers and her control. Depending on her control she could either transfer to their academy, or just visit on weekend if she wanted to practice her powers. They walked her through how SHRA would effect her and said a lawyer would come by her house and go over it again in more depth. They gave her their numbers too. They were nice to her, the way the teachers weren’t: Like they expected her to make good choices if they were made available.”

And there was a small part of Clint that wanted to be suspicious but that part had been shrinking for quite a while now and the truth was he wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t surprised that Rhodes and his Avengers were doing everything they could to shore up the cracks in the Accords and make them work the way they were supposed to. He hated that so many kids end up on the wrong side of the Accords but he couldn’t honestly say that he was surprised that Tony’s friends were working the system to put things to right for them. And he couldn’t pretend that they hadn’t screwed up when they decided Tony was the villain for taking a position they didn’t agree with anymore. 

Even if Tony had been wrong, even if the Accords had been the chain around the Avengers’ necks that they’d feared they should have known Tony better than to ignore his reasoning. They should have known Tony well enough to know that even when he was wrong he had reasons, more often than not good ones for his actions. They should have been willing to hear why he thought the Accords were necessary. After Ultron they should have talked through why Tony had thought something like that was needed instead of letting him leave, instead of leaving him to take all the blame for Ultron. When Tony decided to upgrade their equipment it was because he saw a lack and nine times out of ten once he’d done it there was no arguing that the way was better. If Nat and Steve had truly seen Tony as a friend or even a teammate they wouldn't have kept the information about his parents’ murder from him. Clint knew if they'd ever been the team they'd claimed to be there wouldn't have been a Civil War.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tony’s AI’s: While I was writing this it occurred to me that first Tony built Dum-E, who is fairly limited. Even if he had turned out to be an evil AI there’s not a whole lot he could do (combat capabilities considerably below a human soldier or police officer), Dum-E didn’t go evil.
> 
> Then he made J.A.R.V.I.S., whose ability to construct complex, independent thought far outstrips Dum-E’s. J.A.R.V.I.S. is also allowed access to systems with which he could potentially do a lot more harm. Over the years of J.A.R.V.I.S’ operation Tony continues to give him more and more trust and access. Once the Iron Legion exists, Tony’s more or less given J.A.R.V.I.S. the ability to control an army and still no evil AI tendencies emerge. 
> 
> So he did work his way up with safeguards in place before considering giving a computer the sort of capability he intended Ultron to have. And to me there's a huge difference between someone who disregards safety protocols and causes harm vs. someone who follows all the know protocols and still something bad happens.
> 
> I don’t know where U, Butterfingers, F.R.I.D.A.Y. and J.O.C.O.S.T.A. fall in the timeline beyond pre-Ultron, but I’m assuming that former two match Dum-E’s capabilities and the later two match J.A.R.V.I.S. I’ve read a number of stories where Tony limits F.R.I.D.A.Y. so she isn’t as capable of independent thought/learning as J.A.R.V.I.S. was in response to Ultron. It makes perfect sense but is not the case in my stories. FRIDAY is less experienced than J.A.R.V.I.S. and Tony coded a lock into her systems which prevents her from using any sort of firearms or missiles (Tony told her it was because of she was too young but he might have been lying to spare her feelings).
> 
> In my headcanon Redwing is one of Tony’s AI’s, built after Ultron. And Redwing’s capability for independent thought is back to being closer to Dum-E than to J.A.R.V.I.S. but Tony couldn’t bring himself to remove capability from FRIDAY (or JOCOSTA if I ever hit a point where including her won’t clutter the story with a character who’s too redundant to FRIDAY) even if he isn’t comfortable creating that advanced of AI’s anymore.
> 
> Thor: In AoU the Avengers treat the ability to lift Thor’s hammer as evidence of purity of intent and Thor is treated as a font of wisdom (Well, obviously he’s a better person than the other Avengers. He and Vision are the only ones who can lift the hammer after all). Now I can sort of see assuming that based on the whole centuries old demi-god thing he’s got going for him but then there’s the first “Thor” movie where Thor learned wisdom and compassion from spending a couple of nights with Jane Foster rather than from centuries of living. 
> 
> I can take that as inconsistent writing or assume that Thor never ‘fessed up to the whole backstory of how he ended up in New Mexico stripped of his powers, I’m inclined toward the later because it’s more fun. Thor believes lifting the hammer is infallible proof of good moral character. The rest of the Avengers believe he knows his weapon’s abilities and that he’s got some sort of special wisdom to him. He does have a familiarity, due to cultural background, with artifacts like the Tesseract that is beyond humans (even if he’s not an expert in Asgardian science or magic) and Tony really should have consulted him before doing anything with the scepter for that reason but I don’t think Steve, Natasha or Clint have a thing worth hearing to say about what Tony should or shouldn’t research.


	3. Small Reparations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s been a long time since Bucky’s had the luxury of having the time and space to do more than survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> According Wiki’s MCU timeline Bucharest happens on June 9th and Siberia on June 10th. Pretty tight timeline given all the travel that needs to be accounted for but I’ll go with it (Bucharest to Berlin, Berlin to NY to Leipzig, Leipzig to the Raft to Siberia). Also the bombing of Vienna happened on the 8th and Sharon gave Steve the information that Bucky was in Bucharest the same day, which makes it seem like the only reason Bucky was able to stay at liberty for the two years prior was because the governments of the world were letting Steve handle it himself (just like he wanted).
> 
> Over in AoS, Donnie Gill was captured and brainwashed by HYDRA, he broke free after doing some harm at their bidding. When pursued he couldn’t tell who was HYDRA and who wasn’t so he killed more people to protect himself from recapture. Eventually HYDRA got someone close enough to use his trigger phrase then he was use he is used to cover their escape. But because he wasn’t Captain America’s bestie when he threatened the lives of law enforcement agents (well S.H.I.E.L.D. agents currently operating outside of the law) he was summarily shot and killed. As far as we know Skye’s decision to kill him was never questioned or reviewed, there wasn’t even much angsting done over this kid’s death. The main difference I can see between Bucky in Bucharest and Berlin verse Donny is Bucky was endangering nameless extras and he’s an A-Lister’s most important person, Donny was endangering the show’s main characters and he wasn't particularly close to anyone in the opening credits. 
> 
> Still it’s not really Bucky’s fault he gets special treatment. Of all the members of Team!Cap he annoys me least. His decision to go back into cryo is stands out as a rare example in CACW where a Team!Cap member put the general good over their personal interests. He does put himself and Steve over everyone else both in Bucharest and Siberia but he’s been through a lot and it’s Steve’s choices on Bucky’s behalf that seem to be the biggest obstacle in him getting real help to move past what HYDRA did to him.

King T’Challa stood stiffly on the edge of his private runway as a private jet touched down. Several moments later Pepper Potts stepped out on the tarmac wearing a pencil skirt and severe heels. 

“Just don’t ask her if she’s sure about this,” Shuri murmured to her brother.

“I’m not a fool,” T’Challa replied quietly as they watched Pepper’s approach. “The CEO of one of the largest companies in the world does not fly half-way around the globe to waffle. Especially not when it’s the first time she’s traveled since the birth of her daughter eight months ago.”

“I’m simply aware of how uncomfortable you must be with her presence,” Shuri replied.

“Yes,” T’Challa said regretfully. “I could have saved her lover’s life and I failed to act.” 

“Given the circumstances and your past decisions, I think I’m justified in worrying about how your impulses might impact our country,” Shuri said.

“Thank you for your concern,” T’Challa murmured sarcastically a few moments before Pepper joined them.

“Your Majesty, Princess Shuri,” Pepper greeted them with a small incline of her head. “Have there been any complications?”

“Ms. Potts,” T’Challa replied. “I have a room prepared for you, the test will proceed as planned first thing in the morning.”

“Thank you,” Pepper said. She didn’t say anything else and T’Challa gestured for one of his bodyguards to escort her to her room.

“What are the odds that she is aware Wakanda offered the renegades refuge until they chose to turn themselves in?” T’Challa wondered as he watched Pepper walk away.

“I’d be a fool to wager that she doesn’t,” Shuri said. 

Early the next morning, T’Challa personally escorted Pepper to an observation booth. On the other side of a heavy, bullet proof window Sgt. James Barnes paced nervously across the length of a barren room. Three of the Dora Milaje let themselves into the room and the door was locked behind them. While two of the women took up guard positions near the door the third took out a battered notebook and stepped closer to Barnes. “Are you prepared?” she asked.

He gave a sharp jerk of his head as assent. 

“страстное желание,” the tall woman stated. Barnes’ fists clenched. “ржавые, Семнадцать.” He backed away from her pressing himself against the far wall of the containment cell. “рассвет, Плита, девять.” Barnes’ head came up, he looked at the woman squarely. “добрый, возвращение домой, один.” His shoulders relaxed. “грузовой автомобиль,” she finished firmly.

Barnes sagged with relief. “Nothing, I’m still me.” 

“Sit,” the woman ordered flatly.

A crooked smile lit up Bucky’s face, “Ya’ know what doll? I think I’m gonna pass on that.”

“Are you satisfied?” T’Challa asked Pepper on the other side of the glass.

Pepper gave him a cool look. “I gave your psychiatrists access to the Binarily Augmented Retro Framing technology on the understanding that you would allow me to confirm the destruction of the weapon that killed Howard and Maria Stark. On that matter I’m satisfied that you’ve upheld your agreement,” she said. “I trust that your people have prepared a thorough report on the techniques they used in combination with Tony’s tech for the the Accords committee? After all there are a half-dozen other living victims of HYDRA’s brainwashing who didn’t happen to be Captain America’s best friend and who don’t have a guilty king to plead their case.”

“May I ask how their situations are being handled?” T’Challa sighed.

“With the exception of Sgt. Barnes every known victim of HYDRA’s brainwashing, from Howard Stark in 1946 to the six S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who have been recovered from HYDRA in the last three years, was apprehended as soon as possible after being identified. They were all subjected to treatment followed by evaluation to determine that they had been freed of HYDRA’s influence before being released to resume to their lives,” Pepper relaid. “After the debacle in Berlin were Sgt. Barnes’ conditioning was reactivated the other known, surviving victims were placed under- Well, officially it's being called protective custody but I'd say involuntary commitment is the more accurate term, - and have remained there. Since we have no information on the precise phrases HYDRA used to activate them, ATCU hasn’t been able to confirm, to their satisfaction, that the earlier treatments were successful. This is in spite of the fact that Sgt. Barnes was never required to accept the initial deprogramming and evaluation that was mandatory for every other known HYDRA victim.”

“But they will accept that this treatment works, as it’s effectiveness has been tested with Sgt. Barnes?” T’Challa checked.

“That’s right. The identified agents will be released once they’ve undergone treatment,” Pepper said. “Beyond the six agents currently in custody there were four additional individuals who were identified as victims of HYDRA’s brainwashing but due to their skills and abilities neither ATCU nor any of the S.H.I.E.L.D. fragments that illegally remained active after HYRDA’s infiltration of the organization was exposed were able to capture them. They were killed rather than allowed to remain at large and a danger to the public. While these people were HYDRA’s victims and not to blame for what was done to them they were highly trained, very dangerous S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel who had been stripped of their moral beliefs. Sgt. Barnes was the only one who’s well-being was placed above the well-being of the civilians that he moved among.”

“You are fully aware that once Sgt. Barnes was in my custody he not only willingly submitted to measures to protect the people around him, he suggested them,” T’Challa pointed out.

“I’m also aware that his friendship with _Captain America_ ,” Pepper said distastefully, “is the reason he was allowed to remain at liberty for two years, and the only reason the conditions that allowed Bucharest to happen existed. He received special treatment because of who he knew and it blew up in the world's face. Also, it’s likely that there were other, unidentified, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who did not willingly join HYDRA but were picked up in the sweeps following S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fall. Those people are probably still imprisoned, still being responsible for the actions they took on HYDRA’s behalf. Because they didn’t have anyone with sufficient clout to speak up for them.” 

“Is there something you are asking me to do?” T’Challa demanded.

Pepper’s mouth quirked slightly, “If you have some time left over after championing Sgt. Barnes’ cause, you might want to see if you could use your influence to reopen the files from all former S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who have been incarcerated for ties with HYDRA and make sure that we didn’t miss anyone who didn’t turn willingly.” 

“Of course,” T’Challa said. 

“One last thing before I leave your lovely country,” Pepper concluded. “Now that Sgt. Barnes is demonstrably not at risk of falling back under HYDRA’s control there is no reason for you to continue to block the Accords Committee’s efforts to see him in court for his role in Bucharest, at Leipzig and in Tony Stark’s murder. From all reports he was acting of his own accord during those incidents.” 

“Perhaps, once the Committee agrees with Wakanda’s requirement that Sgt. Barnes be allowed to serve any sentence in our country,” T’Challa replied. “My people have become extremely sympathetic to his story and what we’ve learned of US prison system does not impress.”

_“The purpose of my mission was to make a statement. Kill an Orgburo member who failed to follow the party line closely enough and his family. The boy was three, maybe. I broke the conditioning they put me through for Steve, ‘cause he's my punk, but why the hell couldn’t I break it for that kid? He was hardly more than a baby, a complete innocent. What kind of person am I that I could let myself kill a kid?”_

“Did the treatment work?” Steve asked as soon as Bucky's bi-weekly call connected.

“Yeah Stevie, my mind’s my own,” Bucky sighed. “They even managed to unlock a bunch of memories from back before the war.”

“That- That's great!” Steve exclaimed. “Better than we ever hoped… So why do you sound like you just came from a funeral?”

“Stark’s dame came, wanted to see for herself that the Soldier was gone,” Bucky said. “That Howard and his missus got what little justice they could.”

Steve was silent for a moment. “I’m glad Pepper could recognize the difference between you and what HYDRA made you do,” he said awkwardly.

“They weren't her parents Stevie!” Bucky huffed. “Did you know Howard's death was blamed on reckless driving? They told Howard’s kid that Howard killed his ma!”

“I- I should have told Tony what I found out from Zola, I know that,” Steve’s voice sounded exhausted, beaten, “I could have kept Siberia from happening if I’d just thought things through. It still didn’t give Tony the right to go after you.”

“Stevie, he’d just watched me murder his parents. Not even twenty-four hours before that I killed two guys and shot him at point blank range on Zemo’s say-so. If not for that fancy glove of his I’d have put a bullet in his head. And right before that was the Bucharest clusterfuck. Why wouldn’t he think I was some sort of rabid dog that needed putting down?” Bucky asked flatly. 

“It wasn’t your fault!” Steve protested.

“I shouldn’t have escalated it,” Bucky said.

“You had to protect yourself,” Steve argued desperately. “It was me that screwed up. You shouldn’t suffer for my fuck-ups.”

“If Stark had ‘ve stood down would you have stopped?” Bucky asked. “At any time in that fight?”

“Of course,” Steve replied instantly. 

“You think it’s possible he might stopped if we’d surrendered? Offered to let him take us in? I never properly met him, so you gotta tell me: Do you think he would have kept after me if I hadn’t been putting up a fuss?” Bucky asked.

“They were going to lock you away and you hadn’t done anything wrong,” Steve’s voice broke.

“My lawyer and the the shrinks are conspiring to argue that even after I broke free of HYDRA I was still, um, sufferin’ diminished capacity. That with all of my memories suppressed I was basically running on fight or flight.” Bucky sighed heavily, “I don’t want to be that anymore. I don’t wanna be someone who watches a person get their heart flayed open and only thinks about how it might affect me- Or you ‘cause sometimes I think protectin’ you is all I really got left of me, of the guy who fell off that train.”

“Bucky,” Steve whispered. 

“I killed his parents, you hid that from him. Shouldn’t it have been on us to be the ones that kept our head instead of putting it on him? We weren’t the ones that just got ripped open back there.”

“What are you going to do?” Steve asked.

“They’re asking me to give ‘em whatever I can remember about my Winter Soldier missions: Names, places, whatever details I can pull up. It don’t feel good digging that stuff up but if it can give someone that was left behind a little peace to know the truth then I owe it to them. It ain’t much but if that’s what I can do for now...”


	4. Alternate Strategies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Call this one a bonus for all the lovely, thoughtful comments last time that set the plot bunnies to multiplying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I gave in and bought a copy of the movie. Watching Siberia over, I’d forgotten the point where Steve tries to give Bucky a chance to escape by wrapping a cable around Tony’s neck and jumping into the pit to take Tony out of the air. Even in the armor it’s amazing that he didn’t break Tony’s neck with that stunt. Tony can turn his head in the armor, there is a joint in the neck so some of that force should transmit

**After the call with Bucky, Steve found himself brooding on Bucky’s insistence that things could have turned out differently if the two of them had backed down when Tony lost his head. If they'd been willing to lose that fight.**

**“Tony attacked me,” he told Samson. “What was Bucky supposed to do? Just stand there and let it happen? What kind of friend does that?”**

**“Well, from what you’ve told me about the events leading up to that moment,” Samson sounded a bit too frustrated for professional detachment and Steve took some perverse satisfaction from it, pussyfooting irritated him. “Tony Stark watched his parents be murdered while in the presence of their killer. When he asked you, his friend, if you knew your first response was to prevaricate. Mind you, this is after you’d harshly criticized his lack of openness and this wasn’t about half completed research that you only wanted to have known about in retrospect because something went wrong. This was about you withholding information that was deeply personal to him. What does it look like when one superhero decks another? Because if I take away the powers from both of you and he takes a swing… Frankly he was provoked.”**

_As the video played the blood drained from Tony’s face, leaving the bruise around his eye startlingly vivid against his pallid complexion. Every now and then he glanced at Bucky, only for his gaze to be drawn back to the screen, to the images of Bucky murdering his parents. For a moment he tried to close his eyes against what he was seeing and if it weren't for the lie hanging over their heads like the blade of a guillotine Steve would have reached out and turned him away._

_When it was over Tony took a step toward Bucky. Steve grabbed him and felt a momentary flash of relief when Tony let himself be pulled back._

_Then Tony asked, “Did you know?” And the guillotine fell._

_“I didn’t know it was him,” Steve said knowing it was the wrong thing to say._

_Tony’s voice hardened. “Don’t you bullshit me! Did. You. Know?” he demanded._

_Steve paused staring into Tony’s eyes, trying to find the right answer. “Yes.” he finally admitted and Tony jerked away from him as if burned. Emotions flickered over Tony’s face too quickly to be read. He turned away then viciously backhanded Steve, knocking him head over heels._

_Bucky brought up his gun as Steve went flying and Tony blasted it out of his hands. The air was filled with the sound of metal on metal as Bucky’s metal arm and Tony’s armor clashed and from there it escalated and escalated._

**“Can’t you think of any other way the two of you might have responded?” Samson asked.**

**“What do you think?” Steve asked Sam later, after explaining Samson’s question.**

**Sam chewed his lower lip, “I hate to say it Steve, but it sounds like you were trying to weasel out of admitting to hiding their murders. I don’t know that there’s any right thing to say in a situation like that, but um, ‘I’m sorry’ might have done less harm. It sounds like he might have still been rational, still willing to listen to you then. I don't know- Any truth you told him wasn’t going to help and lying’s worse. You didn’t have a good explanation. Still you might have recognize that he was in pain. I honestly don’t know if it would have changed anything but…”**

**“I shouldn’t have lied, I shouldn’t have held back the information about their murders,” Steve said. “But what about Bucky? He wasn’t wrong to step in and defend me when Tony lost it ?”**

**“Of course not,” Clint interjected, his voice dripping with sarcasm, Steve hasn’t heard anything else from him since their fight, “as long as Tony’s not your priority. As long as the only thing that matters to Barnes is making sure you’re okay and the only thing that matters to you is making sure he’s okay then the two of you did absolutely everything just right. If you give a damn about keeping Tony in one piece, take the fucking hit.”**

**“That’s not Steve’s choice,” Sam protested. “He was on the ground. Steve’s pretty much the only thing familiar in the world to Barnes-”**

**“And Tony’s out of his head from watching his folks being murdered by Barnes. I’d say the guy owed it to Tony to cut him a little slack after that,” Clint said. He turned on Steve, “And don’t tell me you don’t have any ideas on how to act differently when one of your teammates attacks another: The debrief after Ultron’s first attack ring any bells?”**

_After Ultron’s first body was destroyed they’d gathered in Tony’s lab to try to sort out what had happened._

_“All our work is gone,” Bruce said. “Ultron is gone, used the internet as an escape hatch.”_

_“Ultron,” Steve felt his temper building at the name, Tony’s rogue creation._

_Natasha looked up, “He’s been in everything. Files, surveillance he probably knows more about us than we know about each other,” she declared crossing her arms defensively. Clint shifted worriedly, at the time Steve had just thought it was that both spies feared being known by their enemies._

_“He’s in your files, in the internet?” Rhodes interjected, one arm crossed over his body to clasp an injury from the fight. “What if he decides to access something a little more exciting?”_

_“Nuclear codes,” Hill replied, realizing along with Rhodes that this could be a whole lot bigger than some crazy robot going after the Avengers._

_“Nuclear codes,” Rhodes confirmed. “Look we need to make some calls, assuming we still can.” Long before the Accords, Rhodes’ first thought was to collaborate with the government._

_The whole time they were talking Tony just stood over the broken shell that had housed Ultron, staring grimly down at it._

_“Nukes?” Natasha said dubiously. “He said he wanted us dead.”_

_“He didn’t say ‘dead’,” Steve corrected. “He said ‘extinct’.”_

_“He also said he killed somebody,” Clint reminded them._

_Hill looked glanced up with a frown, “There wasn’t anybody else in the building.” And Tony finally spoke, “Yes, there was.” He used a remote to display a hologram of J.A.R.V.I.S.’s brutally torn apart code._

_Bruce and Steve joined Tony staring down at what was essentially a virtual corpse. “This is insane,” Bruce breathed._

_“J.A.R.V.I.S. was our first line of defense,” Steve bowed his head, maybe JARVIS was only a code but he’d felt real, like a member of the team and he was gone. “He would have shut Ultron down. It makes sense.”_

_“No,” Bruce shook his head disagreeing with Steve’s tactical analysis of Ultron’s attack. “Ultron could have assimilated J.A.R.V.I.S. This isn’t strategy… This, is rage.”_

_Thor stalked across the room and grabbed Tony by the throat, lifting the unarmored human off the floor easily. “It’s going around,” Clint observed as Thor lifted Tony higher._

_Tony wrapped both hands around Thor’s wrist, giving himself enough of an airway to speak. “Come on, use your words buddy.”_

_“I have more than enough words to describe you Stark,” Thor growled and Steve realized he was going to have to intervene. “Thor, the legionnaire,” he demanded, distracting the Norse god from his target._

_Thor dropped Tony and gave his report, the critical moment passed._

**“Thor attacked Tony and somehow we all walked away alive,” Clint sneered before storming away. “You could figure it out then, when no one you actually gave a damn about was on the line,” he called over his shoulder.**

**“He’s just-” Sam shook his head.**

**“Angry that I don’t live up to my billing?” Steve ventured but as bitter as Clint had been he couldn’t quite dismiss his point. Laying on his cot he mentally reviewed the two fights, blended them in his mind.**

_“No,” Bruce disagreed with Steve’s tactical analysis of Ultron’s attack. “Ultron could have assimilated J.A.R.V.I.S.” He shook his head, “This isn’t strategy… This, is rage.”_

_Thor stalked across the room and grabbed Tony by the throat, lifting the unarmored human off the floor easily. Instead of Hawkeye’s bland observation, the Hulk remembers the video feeds they’d all reviewed after their first battle as a team. Loki had done exactly the same thing to Tony before throwing him through the shatterproof window of his penthouse apartment and the Hulk had protective streak when it came to his ‘tinman’._

_The force of the Hulk’s roar as he explodes from Bruce’s body is enough to make Thor drop Tony. He raises his hand and the hammer flies to it’s master just as the Hulk backhands Thor across the room. The green behemoth’s next blow doesn’t go unchallenged._

_As they continue to fight Thor begins to gain the upper hand, he shoves the Hulk to the ground and raises his hammer. But by then Tony has summoned his armor and blasts Mjolnir out of Thor’s hand. The Hulk turns the tables on Thor again…_

**‘Of course that wouldn’t have happened,’ Steve realized. ‘Bruce and Tony felt too guilty over Ultron. Besides the rest of us wouldn’t have just stood there and watched.’ Somehow that thought made Steve cringe. It took him a moment to pin down why.**

_The rest of the team, Steve, Clint and Natasha, dog-pile on the Hulk, trying to get the irrational monster off of Thor. Rhodes didn’t have implants like Tony did, he couldn’t summon his armor, so like the eminently sensible person he was he herds Hill and Cho out of the room before any of them could end up collateral damage then sprints for his suit._

_Only the Hulk isn’t the only one protective of his friends, Tony uses the suit’s repulsors and blasts them away from Hulk…_

**Steve shook his head somehow it still didn’t ring true.**

_....Then Tony grabs the Hulk, hustles him to the ‘playroom’ he’d built to contain the behemoth and seals it up behind them because Tony knew how much Bruce hated to lose control, how he feared what he could do in that state. Any and all attempts to breach the room are met with vicious, cutting sarcasm. Rhodes stations himself at the door providing a lock infinitely more effective than Tony’s best tech: He reminds them all that there is a bigger picture and this isn’t the time to be caught up in assigning blame._

**Steve winced, thinking about how even if he’d been attacked Tony wouldn’t have been so caught up in anger that he’d forget to think of Bruce’s feelings in the aftermath only underlined how badly hurt Tony must have been in Siberia.**

**Tony’s anger normally ran cold, shown in increased ruthlessness rather than a loss of control. Even if Steve dismissed Pepper’s insistence that Tony’s failure to gain distance and use his ranged weaponry to it’s best effect because Tony wasn’t trying to kill them… Well what did that leave? A Tony so hurt and betrayed that he’d wanted their flesh under his fists even if that sort of fight only played to the super soldiers’ strengths.**

**Almost hesitantly Steve reviews Siberia keeping the Ultron debrief in mind.**

_Steve paused staring into Tony’s eyes, trying to find the right answer. “Yes.” he finally admitted and Tony jerked away from him as if burned. Emotions flickered over Tony’s face too quickly to be read. He turned away then viciously backhanded Steve, knocking him head over heels._

_Bucky is slower to react, held back by memories of Howard pleading for help, not for himself but for his wife. This is Howard’s son. Steve takes advantage of the momentary respite and gestures for Bucky to stand down. He stays on the floor, not offering a threat. Instead he raises a hand to rub his aching jaw. “Feeling better?” he asks Tony._

_Tony’s helmet had unfolded around his head but he stops, leaving the faceplate open. “No.” It’s not said with regret for his earlier outburst, just an acknowledgement that hurting Steve hadn’t eased the hurt Steve had dealt him._

_‘Where do we go from here?’ Steve wonders but it was Bucky who makes the next move. He puts his gun on the ground and steps away from it, raising his hands. “I surrender.”_

_“Now you decide to surrender?” it’s an honest question if you ignore the tone and somehow without ever having really met Tony before Bucky knows that. But then sarcasm is Bucky’s native tongue as much as it’s Tony’s._

_“What else can I do? Hang around out here waiting for the next bastard to find my override codes?” It’s always jarring to Steve when Bucky uses terms that remind him that Bucky hadn’t simply been out all those years, that he picked things up even as the Winter Soldier. It has a similar effect on Tony._

_“You can stop that right?” Steve asks. “You’ll figure out a way to keep Berlin from happening again?”_

_He watches as the technical challenge pulls another layer of Tony from behind the hurt. “Yeah… Yeah, I got some ideas.” He turns and glares at Bucky, “I’m not doing it for you, it’s for your victims.”_

**Steve sighed, things might have worked out better if Bucky hadn't gone on the offensive but it wasn’t fair to expect that of him. The Bucky in his scenario wasn’t the Bucky from Siberia, on edge from days of being relentlessly hunted and hounded. It was Bucky from Wakanda after spending a couple days barricaded in the room T’Challa offered. But then hadn’t been fair for Tony to learned about his parents Zemo rather than hearing it from Steve years earlier.**

_Bucky brought up his gun as Steve went flying and Tony blasted it out of his hands. The air was filled with the sound of metal on metal as Bucky’s metal arm and Tony’s armor clashed. Tony used the repulsors in his boots to drive Bucky across the room then pinned him under his boot. He pointed the repulsor at Bucky’s head but Steve deflected it with his shield._

_Tony retaliated, taking Steve down with restraints before going after Bucky again. While Steve struggled with the restraints Bucky twisted Tony’s arm and his missile went astray. The whole world turned to flames and falling debris. For a moment the three of them were separated. Steve and Bucky make it to their feet before Tony, but Steve doesn’t tell Bucky to run. “Stand down,” he orders._

_When Tony goes for Bucky again, still lost in rage, Steve grabs him. In the armor Tony’s strength is comparable to his own but he locks his hand around his wrist and holds on, keeping Tony’s hands pinned to his sides. Tony uses the boot repulsors to slam them both into a wall. Steve holds tight but eventually he’s going to lose control of Tony._

_“I’ll sign the Accords.” Not because Steve agrees with them, not because they’re right but simply because signing is a better option than fighting with Tony. The non sequitur shocks Tony into stillness. After a moment Steve lets go and raises his hands. “We surrender.”_

_He’ll sign and if the Accords are as bad as he knows they’re going to be he’ll trust Tony to break them when the time comes. Tony came to Siberia to help, in spite of the Accords, Tony will come the next time as well. They’ll face the threat together and then they’ll go back to General Ross and the UN and tell them where to shove their damned Accords together. Winning right now doesn’t matter, all that matters is stopping the fight before anyone’s seriously hurt._

**Or even simpler:**

_“Stay down. Final warning,” Tony ordered._

_And Steve does because he doesn't have the moral high ground. Tony and Bucky are both hurting, tearing each other apart for his mistakes and maybe that’s a sign that this isn't his fight to win. “Okay Tony, enough. We surrender.”_

_As always Bucky backs his play. He doesn't exactly fake unconsciousness but he stays on the ground. For a moment Tony looks lost at the sudden lack of resistance. T’Challa arrives and takes charge a short while later._

_At first Steve lets himself think that the only thing they’ve lost was Bucky’s metal arm and that could be rebuilt but during the long silent flight to the UN office in Tokyo he realizes that his friendship with Tony was another casualty, it had silently bled out somewhere in the years he hadn't told Tony about his parents._

_With T’Challa’s involvement Bucky gets his trial and eventually Tony’s tech is used to end the Winter Soldier. Pepper and Rhodey come with Tony to support him when he witnesses the proof the Soldier, the weapon that killed his parents, is gone forever. Afterwards, Bucky remained in Wakanda, T’Challa’s efforts on his behalf have won the country over but the rest of the world remains wary. Tony’s influence and media savvy might have been enough to turn the tide of public opinion but he left it to T’Challa and the young king’s influence didn’t extend so far._

_Still, Tony believes in the Avengers, believes they are needed. They still have to sign the Accords or retire but Tony eventually gets them all pardoned. He and Steve will never be part of the same team again. During the war against Thanos they occasionally share a battlefield but Tony never speaks to him again after Siberia. Still Tony's alive and once and awhile Steve sees him on TV with his wife and daughter. Their friendship doesn't survived but Tony does._

**“You were always better at winning battles than wars.” the voice in Steve’s head sounds like Ultron laughing at them from beyond the grave.**


	5. Preparations for War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Earth begins to prepare for Thanos while the renegade Avengers sit on the sidelines.
> 
> Aka even when I try to focus on Sam and Scott, Steve and Clint keep sneaking in and taking over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So 2013 (IM3), Tony blows up his armors, recognizes he has PTSD, tries talking to Bruce who falls asleep and says “Not that kind of doctor.” In 2014 Tony is conspicuously absent from CA:WS but by 2015 (AoU) Tony’s been back with the Avengers for a while and has the Iron Legion. 
> 
> Something changed between IM3 and AoU or Tony wouldn’t have rebuilt the armor. It could have been as simple as he missed being Iron Man or Steve and Co. asked him for help after rediscovering HYDRA but I’ve added the assumption that Tony did seek real help with his PTSD after failing to get any support from Bruce and that while he might have let Pepper think he was giving up Iron Man, really he was just stepping back until he had the PTSD under control.

Peter Quill stood at a small podium in front of the United Nations and tried not to contemplate the odd turns his life had taken to end up standing here. Remembering the ten-year-old boy he’d been the last time he stood on Earth the idea that he’d grow-up to address the United Nations was harder to believe that the whole abducted by aliens part. ‘What kid old enough to remember watching E.T. didn’t daydream about making contact with alien lifeforms at least once and awhile?’ Peter thought ‘Having the whole world waiting to hear what you had to say? That’s something else.’

Then there was the message he had to deliver. Peter looked out at the Earth’s leaders and the camera that would spread his words to the rest of the population. “The Nova Empire is not your enemy. I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow, hearing that your entire planet could be considered collateral damage in a larger war. I grew up here, I’m used to thinking of this place as the center of the universe myself, but it’s not. The Nova Empire consists of over seven hundred inhabited star systems, the population cleared ninety trillion sentient beings in during the last census, taken eight years ago. I know it’s all just numbers and the Earth is your home, but those are the numbers that Nova-Prime has to look at when deciding how to fight Thanos. 

“Thanos already controls an area of space nearly six times the size of the Nova Empire. As far as we’ve been able to determine he’s never lost a war. He’s immortal, the last survivor of an ancient race, as legend has it he’s the last survivor because he personally saw to it that the mantle of his homeworld was burnt away until all that was left was the planet’s molten core. He went on to assemble massive armies that blazed their way across the stars like an intergalactic Genghis Khan. He’s the undisputed ruler of one lobe of the galaxy. Alone, Thanos is the equal to most armies assembled in the history of the universe and he is not alone. Among his conquests he counts an insectoid race that parasitically lays eggs in other species, resulting in their young absorbing some of the traits of the host species and a techno-organic species that is similarly capable of merging with other species. The Chitauri are the end result of hundreds of generations of manipulated evolutions using those two races to create a hive-minded, techno-merged army capable of integrating the strengths of any race it conquers and Thanos has been at this for a long time.”

“The Borg, only uglier?” Peter heard someone whisper to their neighbor but the reference was lost on him. 

“That is the enemy the Nova Empire is facing off against. Destroying the Earth would shield the Nova Empire from Thanos’ depredations indefinitely, that’s why Nova-Prime can’t just take it off the table. But fighting a bottleneck war against Thanos here may be the best chance we’re ever going to get to defeat him. So I repeat the Nova Empire is not your enemy. They’re going to send troops, thirty percent of the Nova Corps and they’ve opened diplomatic channels with every other space-going civilization that we know of, including their bitter enemies the Kree, seeking allies against Thanos.”

“The thing is, the whole of Earth is going to end up a battlefield and even if we give it our best shot we could still lose and the Earth would be destroyed to stall Thanos. I’m not just here today to warn you to start preparing for war, Nova-Prime is offering to evacuate Earth’s non-combatants. Anyone who wants to leave will be offered refugee status in the Nova Empire. The first troop ships will arrive in six months with the Corps’ engineers to start building defenses around Earth. Those same ships can take the first refugees back with them.”

“Ultron,” Rhodey, sitting in the back of the room, muttered.

“What?” Carol asked, leaning close so their words didn't carry.

“They're going to build us what Ultron was meant to be,” Rhodes said. “If we'd spent the time to work through what had Tony spooked instead of just berating him because the damned scepter took over what he was trying to do maybe we wouldn’t be counting on someone else to provide Earth’s defenses.”

* * *

For several moments after the TV switched to an ad the renegade Avengers sat in silence. “Damn, and we wrote Tony off as a paranoid, nut-case for building Ultron,” Clint remarked. 

Sam frowned at Clint’s language, “Stark had PTSD, he was not a ‘paranoid nut-case’.” 

Clint rolled his eyes, “Totally blew past the point Counselor. I just wanted to point out ‘a suit of armor around the Earth’ is starting to sound pretty good.” He gave Steve a sour look, “Now that it turns out that he wasn't ‘trying to win a war before it starts’. The war started in 2012 when Loki first stepped through that portal and started fucking with people's brains.”

“So you're suddenly in favor of Ultron?” Steve demanded irritably. “You and Natasha were the ones telling me not to listen to anything Tony said about the portal.”

“Why not?” Sam asked. “Stark was the only one with firsthand knowledge of the Chitauri forces.”

“Because he was unreliable,” Clint said. “When we got the band back together to hunt down HYDRA after S.H.I.E.L.D. imploded Tony was two months late to respond to the call to assemble. He said it was because he’d blown up all his armors. It took him three months to build the first armor in a cave while he was pretending to build bombs for his kidnappers so Nat and I called bullshit on that and started digging. Turned out he left us hanging to whine to some shrink about the Battle of Manhattan. If Tony couldn't hack it, couldn’t be there when we needed him, he had no business being an Avenger but without his backing there were no Avengers. When he finally decided that he wanted in what could we do about it?”

“Um” Scott raised his hand like the shy school kid, “Wouldn't oversight help with something like that?”

“Since the rest of us all knew that the threat from the Chitauri ended when the portal closed and Tony was just being dramatic it only made sense to ignore his ravings,” Clint continued over Scott. “Only that fleet Tony saw on the other side of the portal is going to be on our doorstep in another several years and now we can't ask Tony about what's coming because he's dead. Thanks to you.”

“I should have told Tony about his parents, Siberia never should have happened. I never should have walked away from Tony without checking that he was really okay to get himself out of there. I should have figured out some way, any way of ending that fight without hurting him so badly, even if meant losing the fight. But why are you blaming me for listening to you when you said Tony was unreliable?” Steve demanded. 

“Can we go back to the part where the root cause for not listening to Tony Stark is apparently because he benched himself while getting help with a mental health issue?” Sam interrupted. “Do you have any idea how often one my guys at the VA would come to group and admit they had known something was wrong but didn't get help until after it blew up because they were afraid that people would dismiss them if it got out that they'd talked to a mental health professional? And here you are telling me they're right to worry!”

“Could we go back to the part where there's an alien space fleet coming and we wasted five years of prep time because it's preparing for war that kills people, not being caught flat footed when the enemy shows up at your door?” Clint sniped bitterly. “Hey Cap, here's a reference from your time: Pearl Harbor. Was it preparing for war that got people killed there?”

“Would you stop putting words in my mouth,” Steve snapped. “I said ‘trying to win wars before they start’, once you start setting yourself up to win the other side is going to try to do something to keep from being at a disadvantage and the next thing you know war is inevitable. You told me Tony was just being hysterical about the portal! And I thought Ultron was supposed to a peacekeeper program, how does it have anything to do with protecting Earth from aliens?” 

“So why didn’t you want to tell Stark about the Winter Soldiers before Leipzig?” Scott asked Sam. He tilted his body slightly away from Steve and Clint’s quarrel.

Sam shrugged, “Wanda’s influence is the easy answer but we’ve worked out that if she’d actively been trying to turn us against him Rhodes wouldn’t have been immune. So I must have had my own issues with Tony Stark for her to latch on to.” 

Sam glanced over at Steve and Clint, their voices were steadily raising. Sam grimaced, he already knew the fight would quickly dissolve into ‘Just a guy from Brooklyn,’ which would only inflame Clint’s temper further. He didn’t know quite how it happened but somewhere along the line he’d stopped seeing Steve’s Brooklyn bit as charmingly humble now it just left him vaguely disquieted for reasons he couldn’t pin down. ‘Clint needs to grow up and stop looking for someone to blame for his problems,’ Sam thought as he started back toward his cell. For most of the day they were allowed the freedom to move between their cells and a common area. 

Scott trailed after Sam like a puppy. “Yeah, um mine boil down to ‘Hank told me never to trust a Stark’ and well, watching Tony Stark on TV he pretty much came off like a rich bastard I’d really hate if I ever met him in person. So I skipped the part about ‘if I ever met him in person’ and went straight to the hating him part at Leipzig.”

Sam sat down on his bunk and waved for Scott to grab the other end of it. He took a few moments to organizes the things that had come up in his sessions with Dr. Samson. “Tony Stark rebuilt my wings and I love them. Maneuverable like nothing else in the sky, they are everything they were ever promised to be and more. Stark Industries built the original wings my partner Riley and I both used and they didn’t keep him safe. I can’t help but wonder if Stark had been personally involved from the beginning would Riley be alive now?” Sam signed, “I don’t want to be that guy. I know, rationally, it wasn’t fair or right to blame Stark for Riley’s death but a part of me did anyway. There’s something temptingly satisfying about having a face, a name to pin the blame on.”

Scott made an aborted gesture as if to reach out and pat Sam on the shoulder.

“We can’t help how we feel, it’s how we act that matters. That’s what I told myself,” Sam continued. He shrugged, “So what if I didn’t like Tony Stark? When he came out to compound I’d put on my company manners. I made an effort to keep him from realizing I might harbor an irrational grudge against him. I’d say I was professional when I worked with Wanda, maybe I could have found a way to push her harder to get over her problems with him but I never said anything bad about him myself. No one ever said I had to like Tony Stark. The reality is I didn’t know Tony Stark and I never once let that get in the way of not liking him.” 

“Yeah, I can see that,” Scott said, thinking about how Hank’s loathing for Howard Stark had colored his view of Tony Stark and that Scott had turned around and accepted that second-hand opinion as gospel. “I mean no one can expect you to like everyone.” 

“As long as you don’t let it get in the way of getting the job done,” Sam said with a guilty look. “After Berlin Steve asked my opinion about whether or not we should tell Tony Stark about the Winter Soldiers and I said Stark wouldn’t believe us, that he’d let the Accords tie his hands. I let my prejudices about Tony Stark lead me to giving advice on the man when I didn’t have any business offering an opinion. ‘What could a guy like Tony Stark know about personal loyalty? About having a teammate’s back no matter what?’ That’s what I was telling myself when I told Steve not to talk to Stark.”

“But what about Rhodes?” Scott asked. “Weren’t they like best buds?”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Sam sighed. “Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes? That’s the stuff of legends.”

“And about six movies, half of them not even the made-for-television variety,” Scott agreed.

“Tony Stark and James Rhodes? Not so much. I used to be Air Force, same as Rhodes. It wasn’t that big of a world and he was notable.” Sam shrugged, “There was always talk about what he got out of putting up with Stark. Maybe it wasn’t true but it was always there.”

“Well, Steve and Bucky, the sort of friendship you’d burn the world for seems a little less romantic looking back,” Scott said quietly. “You know, on the five dead, thirty-some injured and billions of property damage. And there's the part where I might never get to see my daughter again. I signed on for world-in-peril, not Cap’s bestie. Or maybe it’s the whole hero thing that feels less romantic now.” Scott sighed, “When Hank let me keep the suit I was thinking about fighting the bad guys, cheering crowds, saving the city… I don't know how you handled disaster relief on a regular basis.”

Sam grimaced, “I used to get a lot of satisfaction from doing what I could, pulling off rescues only a few people in the world could have. After Riley died things changed, I changed. Instead of focusing on the lives I’d saved I started fixating on the ones I lost. I had to quit. I still wanted to help, that’s why I got involved in working with PTSD groups at the VA, but I couldn’t handle the pressure of being a PJ anymore. Then Steve came along and I could fly again. With Captain America calling the shots I didn't have to second guess myself or obsess about making the wrong call. I had my old certainty back... You should know it was me and my piss-poor advice that gets the lion’s share of the blame for you being dragged into this,” Sam told Scott. “I’m the one who called you in-” 

“And I was insanely flattered that you thought of me given that I was stealing shit from you when we met,” Scott said stanchly. “Good cause or not.”

“I was the one who had the best shot at getting Steve and Stark on the same page before we went after Zemo,” Sam said. “And I fucked it up.” 

Scott blew out a huge gust of air. “I’m sort of conscious of the fact we’re stuck sharing tight quarters for the next couple years regardless of how this plays out,” he said.

“I wish Steve and Clint would think about that,” Sam muttered.

Scott flashed Sam a quick smile, “Don’t we all.”

* * *

Pepper walked into SI’s R&D. She waited until everyone was staring at her then she took off one of the bracelets Tony had made for her and set it in the middle of the conference table. “I need this reverse engineered and scaled up to work with the full-sized arc reactors,” she said. “Stark Industries is going into the business of making city-sized energy shields.”

One of the engineers delicately picked up the bracelet and popped open the back panel.

“We’re on a deadline folks,” Pepper said. “The alien invasion is expect in the fourth quarter of 2019. Our goal is to have at least five hundred shielded cities ready to greet them.”

* * *

Steve glanced at Dr. Samson uncertainly, “Clint and I got in another fight and um, it wasn't even really what we were fighting about but he said something. What he thought Tony was trying to do with Ultron wasn't what I thought Tony intended.”

“Go on,” Samson encouraged.

“I don’t know that it matters either way,” Steve hedged. “Whatever Tony wanted Ultron to be it doesn't change what it became.”

“Why did you bring it up if it doesn't matter?” Samson asked.

“Because I should have known!” Steve exclaimed. “We blamed Tony for making a murder-bot but I don't know if he was trying to protect the planet from attack or build a benevolent version of Project Insight. I should know that! But it doesn't change anything. 

“Everyone criticizes me for hanging onto the past, except when I don't! Wanda realized she'd been wrong to help HYDRA and Ultron, she couldn't change what she'd done in the past but she was trying to do better. She was capable of so much good but not if she didn't get the chance to show that she'd changed. Isn't what she was going to do in the future the important thing?”

“What thinking did Wanda change?” Samson asked curiously.

“Well, she realized that HYDRA and Ultron were the bad guys and we were the good guys,” Steve said.

“All of you?” Samson asked.

“Expecting her to like Tony wasn't fair. She stopped trying to hurt him,” Steve protested.

“Ignoring all arguments about whether or not she could reasonably hold Tony Stark responsible for her parents’ death, did she stop trying to hurt him because she understood that revenge was wrong or because she didn't want to risk her relationship with the rest of you?”

“I don't know,” Steve admitted.

“Or was it because her presence among the Avengers helped to drive him away? Was she consciously aware that she could take his friends from him simply by playing upon your sympathy for her after her brother’s death?”

Steve looked away.

“Do you know if she felt remorse for the people she harmed while she was with HYDRA?”

“Of course she did.”

“Did you ever talk to her about it?”

“Wanda isn't some sort of monster,” Steve protested. “She was just trying to protect her country!”

“No,” Samson said firmly. “That is why you volunteered for Project Rebirth. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff joined HYDRA to gain the power to hurt Tony Stark because they held him responsible for their parents’ death.”

Steve’s mouth tightened, he turned away, physically rejecting what Samson was saying.

Samson sighed, “You’re right you know: It is important that you never found out what Tony Stark hoped to accomplish by creating Ultron. That you never really talked to Wanda Maximoff about her past, about her moral structure, even when you knew that she’d only recently had the epiphany that working for a terrorist organization was bad. One of my main goals in working with you is to teach you to spot patterns of behavior that lead to unfavorable outcomes so you can change that pattern of behavior. Did you ever really, truly talk to Tony Stark about why he supported the Accords?” 

Steve shook his head. 

“I’d like you to tell me what the pattern of behavior is,” Samson said gently. 

Steve fidgeted in his chair, hands and feet moving restlessly. Samson waited without saying anything more. Five minutes stretched into ten. 

“I was mad at Tony for not telling me things,” Steve said finally. “After Ultron, I was mad because he hadn’t told me. ‘Sometimes my teammates don’t tell me things.’ But I don’t ask and I don’t listen to what they do tell me.”

“Thank you,” Samson said with relief.

* * *

“We're not going,” Laura said. “We’re staying on Earth.”

“Because of me?” Clint asked. When he'd heard about the Nova Corps’ offer to evacuate Earth’s noncombatants his first reaction had been to worry that Laura and the kids would be swept off to the far end of the galaxy and he'd never see them again. Hearing her say they weren't going he worried that Laura had the same thought and his family would end up in the line of fire because of it… Or that they hadn't been given the option because of him.

“I'm not the running type,” Laura said. “If I were I'd have headed for the hills the first time you came clean about exactly what you did for a living, instead I married you. The Earth is my home, I'm not giving it up.”

“This isn't the same,” Clint protested. “I won't be able to keep you safe with the wrong name on a marriage license and painting a red splotch across half my face when we go into town. From what I've been hearing on the news the whole planet’s gonna end up a battleground.”

“I know,” Laura said. “I talked to Phil. When the time comes worrying about people with grudges against you will be fairly low priority next to worrying about becoming collateral damage. You're not the only S.H.I.E.L.D. agent with kids, when the war starts I'll retreat to a bunker with the other S.H.I.E.L.D. families, most of us stay-at-home spouses of agents have pretty thorough combat training, as a group supplemented by a few agents we'll form a defensible block for the kids. Don't worry about us, I can handle myself.”

“You’re not even considering that bugging out might be only safe choice?” Clint felt compelled to ask. “What I gathered from Quill’s speech is that if things start getting dicey… Well, it'll be the WSC nuking Manhattan all over again, only without the convenient portal to shove the nuke through.”

“Clint, it's decent of this Nova-Prime to offer us humans refugee status in his Empire, given how their government is considering blowing up our hime, but it won't come to that,” Laura laughed. “That Peter Quill, he makes Thanos sounds like a real boogie-man but we have experience with him. The last time he sent an army after the Earth you and five friends kicked their butts. No one is seriously considering abandoning the Earth because the Chitauri are trying again.”

* * *

The video appeared out of nowhere. When it first appeared on line Vision spent a few moments interrogating FRIDAY about it but the young AI pled ignorance, “I promised both the Boss-Lady and Colonel-Man I’d check with them before trying social engineering again!” 

Dr. Helen Cho’s first suspect was her only son. “Mom! Just because it’s totally something my friends would do doesn’t mean we actually did do it,” Amadeus protested. “Everyone I know in the Rising Tide is scrambling to try to verify that it’s for real.”

The video came from a security camera, from the angle it was meant to cover the door. But the sound quality was good and Tony Stark’s agitated pacing put him in and out of the camera’s view as he spoke. 

_“No I’m not being hysterical. Hysterical would be comparing them to a horde of locust or something poetic like that. I am telling you what I saw. The whale ships, about six deep in the z-axis and as far as I could see in the X and Y. You can see a candle at thirty miles on a dark night, but the whale ships don’t produce lights so I was seeing off of reflected photons alone. My best guess is I could see ten mile out. They were spaced about one ship every ninety thousand square feet. That’s roughly two hundred thousand ships and that’s just what I could see… “_

_A hubbub protests overrode Tony’s voice and that’s where the video ended._

* * *

Gamora reluctantly accepted the chair Quill pulled out for her as the two Guardians joined Rhodes, Danvers, Hank Pym, T’Challa, Romanov and Director Ross in a UN conference room with a view of the East River and beyond that, Brooklyn. Her posture radiated a constant readiness for battle.

“You told us Thanos needs the Earth,” Rhodes said, skipping any pleasantries after a long look at Gamora. “What for?”

“Water, air,” Gamora stated. “The best purifying systems in the galaxy still reach their limits eventually. Ships can only go so long without stopping on a planet with a living hydrologic cycle where they can replace overtaxed air and water with fresh.”

“Seems like too many ships stopping by and the planet would be no better,” Hank observed.

Gamora nodded, “You are correct, given the Earth’s size and composition, Thanos can restock no more than a thousand ships a month without rendering the Earth useless to him.”

“Some good news,” Carol said. “Finally.”

“He can only restock a thousand ships a month,” Gamora pointed out. “He can send as many more as he wishes to sacrifice and if there is one thing you can count on with Thanos it is his willingness to sacrifice lives.”

“Great,” Rhodes sighed. 

“However,” Gamora added. “He is not thoughtlessly wasteful of his resources. The Earth is not his end goal, merely a waystation that he must take before expanding his war on life to the Nova Empire. Intergalactic warfare is a ponderous business. When ships travel at speeds exceeding that of light communication returns to its roots: The speed at which words travel is equal to that of messengers. The armada will adapt but slowly to your tactics.”

“How about generals?” Rhodes asked.

“After Loki of Asgard’s… creative liberties Thanos has been reluctant to allow his lieutenants much latitude. Knowing the fate that awaits Loki when he is returned, only those like myself who choose to turn against Thanos altogether would dare to go against his smallest order... Even if his methods are shown to be ineffective.”

“How close are we to the limits of Thanos’ range?” Danvers asked.

Gamora smiled toothily. “Thanos’ troops will arrive on rationed supplies or recently woken from cryogenic sleep. If you can deny them the chance to restock they will die before making another port.”

“Total warfare,” T’Challa said gravely. “All who come must take the Earth or perish and there is no retreat for us either. This is our world and we will not be pushed from it.”

“About that,” Quill said. “Being an Earth expat in the Nova Empire isn't so bad. I wish you'd make a stronger effort to convince people to evacuate. The first Nova transport will arrive in four more months, with others following every other month. Now transports are basically boxes attached to very large engines. They'll bring troops and supplies to Earth and there's enough room to take a hundred and fifty million off planet in cyro pods on their return trip. That's nearly twenty five percent of the population that can be moved to safety before the first Chitauri heavy bombers arrive. People can come back after the war ends but we won't be able to make up empty outgoing berths later.”

“The first two months will be the most critical,” Gamora said. “The Chitauri heavy fighters will reach Earth before their Nova Corps equivalents and Earth must not fall before reinforcements arrive.”

* * *

The TV anchor man looked into the camera with a grim expression. “Evidence of the massive army Peter Quill and his alien associates warned the Earth against two months ago had been independently verified. The following pictures from the Kepler and Webb telescopes show a massive fleet of ships, sufficient to block the light from distant stars as the armada passes through their systems. Careful analysis of astronomical images dating back to 2012 clearly shows this alien fleet moving toward Earth. If the alien armada continues at its present speeds it will arrive on Earth in the year 2020.”

* * *

Dr. Pym looked uncomfortable as he stood up in front of the UN committee, “It’s not what you asked for, not a way to fight but I think, with a little work, I could set up the means to shrink a city. There’s an increasing number of people who are in favor of leaving the planet, this way they could get a head start on a new planet, bring their whole infrastructure with them.”

“We could ensure the preservation of some of Earth’s most historic cities,” Hope said. “Like the people we can bring the cities back when it's safe but in the immediate future we have to be ready to accept that the Earth is going to take damage. The shields Stark Industries are developing will help but we can't shield the entire planet. It makes sense to move some of what must be protected out of the war-zone while we have the chance.”

“Which cities? How can a call like that be made?”

* * *

“You look tired,” Scott said when Hope came to visit him. “What’s going on?” 

“I never thought I’d be part of trying to evacuate the Earth,” she said. “It feels wrong, feels like giving up. But… It’s going to get bad Scott, even if we win the Earth will likely be under siege for years and the way the Guardians tell it, there’s no reason for Thanos to ever stop coming. He won’t die of old age, he has an empire that spans around a hundred thousand star systems, he’s not going to run out of soldiers to throw at us.”

“So people are really evacuating?” Scott asked. “Clint’s wife made it sound like no one was worried.”

“That was before we started getting confirmation from our telescopes,” Hope said. “There’s a massive army out there, Stark saw it back in 2012 but even people in a position to know buried their heads in the sand. Plans were made for another portal, another bottleneck battle but this time the Earth is the bottleneck and there’s no closing it off without losing the planet.

“The UN is coming up with a series of criteria ranking the Earth’s cities,” Hope said. “Then the city votes. If seventy percent of the population chooses to go the city goes. We'll arrange land swaps for people from those cities that choose to stay.”

* * *

“You asked for me?” Foggy Nelson asked Clint. 

“I take it you’ve turned on the TV in the three months?” Clint said. “What do I need to do to be in a position to look after my family when War of the Worlds starts? Do I sign the Accords, kiss up to the second-string Ross, what?”

Foggy stared at the archer in disbelief, “Now you want to sign the Accords?”

“No, now I admit I don’t give a damn about them,” Clint said flatly. “Sign, don’t sign? They’re just pieces of paper. Nat told me I could sit this one out but Steve said he needed me.” Clint’s expression darkened. 

“I don’t understand,” Foggy said shaking his head. “You don’t care about the Accords one way or another, so why would you opt to act in defiance of the law?”

Clint looked back, equally puzzled, then his expression cleared. “Oh right, you actually believe laws mean something,” he said. “Phil Coulson spent a lot of time trying to convince me of that and it wasn’t a total waste of both our time, we eventually came to agree that people who aren’t afraid of their own government are better off but…” Clint shrugged, “No matter how idealistic the government you can always find pockets ruled by petty dictators. If that guy’s in charge of the whole country everyone suffers, if he’s just the head of the household then his kids and wife suffer. When it came to the Accords Ross was the petty dictator and he was right at the top. 

“Everyone tells me I shouldn’t be mad at Tony for getting me locked up in the Raft, ‘cause he was just following the law.” Clint rolled his eyes, “Like not following a law isn’t a choice. There were plenty of laws against the stuff my dad did and even more against how the guys in the circus really made their living. Then S.H.I.E.L.D. picked me up, they said they wanted to give me a second chance because I was underaged but you know what? I did exactly the same stuff for S.H.I.E.L.D. as I did for the Crime Circus, so from my point of view what they really did was hire me because they were impressed by what I could do. They just couched it in a lot of bullshit about redemption and restitution to make themselves feel better. I’m an assassin, a sniper. I have been making a career out of shooting people since I was thirteen. It was illegal when some random fuck paid me to do it but morally just fine when S.H.I.E.L.D. was naming my targets... Until it turned out S.H.I.E.L.D. was HYDRA anyway. So we all went to work for Captain America, what could be safer than that? Then Thunderbolt Ross gets himself nominated as the Avengers’ new boss.” Clint shrugged, “I told Nat I could solve her Ross problem,” he snapped his fingers, “like that. She said no thanks, Tony had it handled. Turned out he didn’t. 

“I was nineteen when Phil Coulson became my handler. He was the first person who made an effort to show me what S.H.I.E.L.D. was trying to accomplish, what I was a part of. At home not getting noticed was a necessity of survival. In the Circus you didn’t eat if you didn’t contribute. When S.H.I.E.L.D. picked me up they made it clear I could either follow their orders or sit in a cell. Phil was different, he wanted me to believe I could change the world for the better, even given what I’m good at. But you know how that worked out, HYDRA wormed it’s way into S.H.I.E.L.D. and turned it rotten from the inside out. Too big, too many agendas to keep track of what everyone was up to, even for a sharp guy like Phil. I trusted Phil, I even trusted Fury, bastard that he is, and I still do trust them. I trust them to want to do the right thing but they couldn’t tell the difference between the WSC being a bunch of cowards and being HYDRA. I hear from Nat that the new S.H.I.E.L.D./Not S.H.I.E.L.D. is tighter, fewer people, fewer agendas to keep track of. We tried that. Except it turns out Steven Fucking Rogers can have agendas too, when it comes to his best friend.” 

Foggy grimaced. “I do like him you realize that?”

“Who doesn’t?” Clint asked. “Hell, as mad at him for getting us into this mess I still know he believed in what he was doing. I even agree that Barnes didn’t deserve any of the shit that happened to him since falling off that train in WWII. After seventy years of mind wipes and torture the guy deserves to catch a break but not at the cost of my family. Barnes may be worth it to Steve, but not to me.

“Look, I don’t care about the Accords. Good laws, good governments are better than poor ones, Phil taught me that, but good laws don’t change that people are generally assholes. I’m an asshole, I should know. I liked Tony, he was fun to hang out with, he supported us when S.H.I.E.L.D. went belly up but I figured he had too many personal problems to trust him in the field. But, hey, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you is it? I should have listened to the crap Tony was freaking out about. I didn’t, a bunch of aliens are going to attack our planet we’re a lot less prepared than we should be and so when they come I need to be with my family. Any of the Chitauri come their way? I shoot them, that is what I’m good at. Just tell me what I need to do to make that happen.”

“You don't ask for much do you?” Foggy said shaking his head. “How much attention did you pay to Scott Lang’s trial? It's the reason your lawyer didn't try the ‘Captain America made me do it defense’. What came out during your, Lang and Wilson’s trials, what you just confirmed again, is that you’re not capable of complex moral judgements. Whether you care about the Accords or not you were part of killing five people, assaulting thirty-two more and doing several billion dollars of property damage, ostensibly to prevent people with agendas from being put in a position to give you orders… Unless it's Steve. 

“This is in spite of a strong precedent that following orders is not sufficient excuse for morally abhorrent behavior. Steve was in the ice before the Nuremberg Trials, what's your excuse? That you can’t tell a good order from a bad one? The general consensus is that if that’s the case most people would like you to try following the goddamn laws. Steve, for all that he let himself get caught up in protecting Bucky Barnes actually did have an opinion about the Accords. As far as I can see, you, Lang and Wilson picked your side based on who you liked better. 

“The general public has been willing to accept the Wanda Maximoff’s powers are to blame for the Avengers’ decision to cover up her involvement with HYRDA, working for Ultron and siccing the Hulk on Johannesburg. People are willing to believe it was her powers that made you think having her as active member of the team was a good idea. Frankly, people are willing to believe mind control was involved because otherwise the Avengers’, all the Avengers’ decision to trust a marginally reformed terrorist is just too disturbing. But they aren’t going to swallow that you know better than the leaders of one hundred and seventeen countries when apparently all you knew about the Sokovia Accords before smashing an airport was that you liked Steve Rogers more than Tony Stark.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMO AoU is one of Marvel’s weaker efforts. Going back and watching it more closely I end up feeling like there are massive disconnects: What was Ultron intended to do? What did Tony and Bruce actually do vs what Steve and the other Avengers THINK Tony (since they apparently forget Bruce was involved) was trying to do and actually did? 
> 
> The nature of Tony's vision and the line about armor around the world makes Ultron seem like a defense against external attack. The stuff about 'Peace in our time.' and obsoleting the Avengers possibly adds an internal policing aspect which could be considered worryingly close to Project Insight. Steve, Nat and Clint might actually have something useful to say about whether or not that sort of policing was a good idea. Also programing a computer to make that sort of judgement is a landmine, just think about the question self-driving cars raise: For example a group of people on the sidewalk, one person in the car's path and an oncoming car with passengers. If the car can't break fast enough do you hit the one pedestrian and keep everyone else safe? Do you hit the oncoming car and risk lesser injuries to both cars' passengers? Should the car's programing be weighted to prioritize its passengers over people outside the car? Does the answer change if the person in the road is a child chasing a ball or an adult staggering drunkenly out of a bar? With people it's spur of the moment, you don't have time to think. With a computer you have to consciously program in weighting on value of life ahead of time. I'm left not feeling entirely sure what Tony's intentions for Ultron were vs what Ultron distorted as he scanned the internet looking for more data establish a purpose for himself. To me uncertainty about what Ultron was intended to be is just sloppy writing. 
> 
> I'm also left unsure if Steve objected to Ultron because it went horribly wrong or if he objected to what Tony was trying to do. “Sometimes my teammates don’t tell me things” feels like projection now that we know Steve was keeping secrets from Tony at that point. “Trying to win a war before it starts,” is delivered with such conviction it seems like it was meant to go unquestioned (like the viewers are just meant to accept that Tony is to blame for Ultron) but it’s ridiculous on examination. I also think it's highly likely that none of the other Avengers really heard or comprehended the part where Bruce and Tony weren't ready to activate Ultron and don't know how it just came on line. They were too busy blaming Tony to listen to any inconvenient details about factors that were beyond his ability to control.


	6. Not Another Pretty Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda runs into anew Enhanced who's interactions with SHRA start off poorly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should stop trying to guess the length of my stories ahead of time. This was supposed to be one chapter composed of four shorts all dealing with new heroes finding their way in the post-Accords world and Team!Cap reacting to them. But the first one is at my target chapter length all by itself so… Forced Reflection will be longer than anticipated.
> 
> Possibly the biggest obstacle to making any ground on redeeming Team!Cap is the occasional conversation with or review from a Team!Cap fan: The Accords must be rift with human rights violations because Ross supported them, T’Chaka’s support of them is meaningless. The UN is totally ineffective because of countries like the US and Russian pursuing their own agendas but those same two countries will both tee up behind Ross to use the Avengers as their attack dog. If the Avengers signed they’d lay themselves open to punished for not following amoral orders… And they won’t be laying themselves open to even more censure by ignoring laws before having an example of an amoral use of the law to justify their disobedience? Mention Lagos and collateral damage is an unavoidable reality of combat but the notion that Wanda’s parents were collateral damage in some sort of legitimate US military action isn’t palatable, it has to be that the missile was in the hands of some sort of bad guy. 
> 
> Given the following assumptions: That Wanda’s in her mid-twenties. That her parents died when she was about ten. And Sokovia is an Eastern European country. I went looking for US military action in that region around the year 2000 and I find NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. You don’t need Stane selling that particular missile to terrorists, just the Clinton administration finding the evidence of ethnic cleansing in the Kosovo War convincing to put US missiles in the right spot. That is my head-cannon for bigger picture of what was going on in the world to bring a bomb to the Maximoff’s doorstep, because I seriously doubt that they were living in some sort of idyllic paradise and a shifty SI customer randomly fired a missile at their house just because. It doesn’t matter which side of the war the Maximoffs supported, they were likely non-combatants, collateral damage no matter who pulled the trigger.

“I’ve got a new case,” Foggy said. Steve tilted his head to the side encouragingly. Foggy’s visits were normally spent explaining Samson’s intentions... And even with Foggy’s explanations the whole thing still seemed manipulative to Steve. ‘If Samson thinks was I’m doing something wrong he should just say it instead of trying to trick me into thinking it was my own idea.’ But if there was something on Foggy’s mind Steve wanted to hear it. He didn’t like how one-sided their relationship was.

“The SHRA board denied accreditation to a new Enhanced,” Foggy said. “They’re looking for a way to remove her powers.”

“On what grounds?” Steve demanded furiously.

“Mental instability. She got her powers experimenting on herself,” Foggy said. “Turned herself into some kind of lizard-person.”

“And she’s opposed being turned back?” Steve asked shocked.

Foggy shrugged, “She regrew her two severed legs. She says she’s happy the way she is, her family says she’s become an entirely different person after taking the serum.”

“Are they right?” Steve asked with a frown. “The unstable version of the super-soldier serum that the Red-Skull used on himself deformed his mind as well as his body.”

“An independent psychiatric evaluation is fairly high on my to do list,” Foggy said. “But she has a history of issues with depression dating back to the loss of her legs in high school. She probably is different now that she has them back, it’s not necessarily a bad sign.”

Steve frowned.

“You haven’t even met her,” Foggy protested, “Don’t go getting it stuck in your head that she’s some ‘Green Skull’ villain.”

“I just don’t want you getting hurt,” Steve sighed. He took a deep breath, “And obviously I haven’t met her. I shouldn’t be forming any opinion of her.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t get emotionally invested in my clients until after I’ve gotten to know them,” Foggy said with a small grin. “And Vision will be overseeing my initial visit with her, just in case she is dangerous.”

* * *

Everett Ross frowned severely at General Talbot, “How do you think it looks? The first ugly one to come forward and register herself and we stick her in a nut house!”

“How she looks has nothing to do with SHRA’s assessment,” Talbot growled. “We listened to her family’s assessment! They felt threatened.”

“Or you need to clean house, again,” Everett snapped. “She’s useful, a Ph.D. candidate with a super soldier’s field capabilities.”

“Doesn’t play well with others, can barely open her mouth without insulting someone… And she’s not low-profile.”

“So what? Ignore the scales and you could have been describing Tony Stark.”

* * *

Wanda was having what Dr. Samson called a ‘Good Day’ but Wanda wasn’t so sure. ‘Good Days’ meant knowing that Pietro and her parents were dead. ‘Good Days’ meant seeing the wariness in Visions’ eyes where it had never been there before, really hearing it when he said “I took your powers so you would not give people reason to fear you any longer.”

‘Good Days’ were coming on a more regular basis as the shock of hearing that Stark wasn’t behind the missile that killed her family gradually wore off. ‘Good Days’ meant having to talk with Dr. Samson about her parents, about the missile and about Stark. Wanda supposed she’d always known that Stark hadn’t fired the missile that killed her parents. She’d never really thought about who fired the missile before, ‘It doesn’t change that Stark built the thing that killed my family… Does it?’

Samson made everything complicated, he made her study the war that had torn her country apart. As she read Wanda found herself vaguely remembering her parents talking about the good old days when there’d been a president strong enough to quell nationalistic tensions. She remembered them saying they hoped one of the leaders would gain power so he could keep people like them safe and worrying about what would happen to them if a different leader gained too much power but that was all before those horrible two days and her memories of before were foggy at best. She vaguely remembered thinking that von Strucker was the sort of strong leader who could restore peace in her country but mostly just thinking that he could help her get revenge on Stark, only it turned out that von Stucker probably had more to do with Stark’s missile falling on her home than Stark had. Of course if the Americans hadn’t sent their planes and bombs to interfere with her country then none of her countrymen would have shot that one plane down and Stark’s missile wouldn’t have fallen on her family.

Wanda had been startled to learn that the interfering, corrupt UN that had her locked up after Lagos had voted against the US and NATO sending their planes to her country but they’d ignored the UN and sent them anyway because they believed they were stopping something worse from happening and her parents had died. Just like the UN wouldn’t have allowed her and the Avengers into Lagos but they’d gone anyway because they had to stop Rumlow before he could do something worse and people had died. Wanda hated ‘Good Days’ and thinking things like that.

Wanda glanced around hoping to distract herself from the uncomfortable thought that she wasn’t any different from the people who killed her parents. She noticed a new girl in the asylum's dayroom. She carried herself with pride and confidence, her head was crested by a fin several shades darker green than her scaly skin. Despite the scales her features were still human and Wanda guessed that the girl was close to her age. Apart from Pietro, Wanda hadn’t had many opportunities to interact with people her own age. She headed over feeling almost excited. “Hi, I’m Wanda. What’s your name?” she asked.

The new girl eyed her warily then sighed, “Melati Kusuma. My parents just had me committed because I’d rather look like this than be stuck in a wheelchair. So what’s your story?”

“I had powers too,” Wanda sighed sadly. “At first I wanted them because I was tired of always being the victim then I decided that I wanted to use them to help people. But everyone was scared of me because of what I could do, so they took my powers away and put me here.”

Melati looked Wanda over critically, “Oh hell, I heard about you on the news. You’re that terrorist who used mind powers to get the Avengers to cover up your past.” She got up and started to walk away.

Wanda caught her arm. “I didn’t mean to. Once I realized what Ultron intended I did everything I could to stop him.” Her eyes teared up, “My brother died trying to stop Ultron. I didn’t have anyone left and I just wanted to help. Steve said I could help.”

Melati shook Wanda’s hand off, “Well, yippee for you, you didn’t want to help destroy the planet. Give the girl a fucking metal. But a bunch of lunatic Neo-Nazis, you didn’t have any problems working for them now did you? I saw the list of targets from Project Insight, my mentor was on it.”

Wanda looked bewildered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about HYDRA, you know, those guys you used to work for before you hooked up with the planet-killer robot,” Melati snapped. “They decided my mentor was someone who might get in their way some day and tried to preemptively murder him along with seven hundred, thousand other people.” She studied Wanda’s confused expression for a moment then snorted. “You don’t have a clue do you? Selfish little bitch, buried so deep in your own self pity that you never even thought about what you were supporting, just what you were getting out of it. The Raft was too good for the likes of you.”

Wanda leapt to her feet, “You don’t know what it’s like growing up in a war-zone!”

“And you don’t know what it’s like to lose both your legs,” Melati replied, thoroughly unimpressed. “Everyone has problems some people use them as an excuse to stay whiney little morons, other people recognize them as sign to grow-up and get over themselves.”

* * *

It took two months for Foggy to resolve all the pre-trial motions and get Melati’s case to trial.

“Melati was such a quiet, studious girl,” her mother mourned. “But after- after that company drove her to- to do that to herself, she changed. Aggressive, rude, she was going out and getting in fights.”

“I hate to say it but I think Mel’s mother has forgotten what she was like before the accident,” A high school classmate that Foggy had dug up testified. “She pretty much turned into a recluse after losing her legs, but the only reason she got away with half the crap she said before the accident was because none of the guys she laid into wanted to punch a hundred pound, five foot nothing girl… And she was pretty back then.”

“This is a video recording of one of the animal tests performed, I caution you that some of the footage is disturbing.” The video started playing, showing Melati’s hands as she injected her serum into a three-legged rabbit with a raw-looking surgical scar where the fourth leg had been.

_“Subject SA-4 is three weeks post-amputation,” Melati dictated coolly as she worked. “I am injecting 20 cc’s of variant D-23 into the amputation site at 10:20am, on 4/23/15.”_

_The rabbit began to thrash. Melati withdrew to a safe distance as the animal screamed. Scales erupted from beneath fur. A bulge appeared beneath the scar where the rabbit’s leg had been removed. “Preliminary effects look promising,” Melati said. Her hands reappeared in the camera’s view. She picked up the now scaley rabbit and spent a few moments soothing the animal before repositioning it to provide a better record as she measured the changes in its haunch._

The video cut out for a moment.

_“It is 5/11/15, day 18 of the trial.” The scaled rabbit now had a small, fetal-looking limb growing from the former amputation-site. “Injecting an additional 5 cc’s of D-23.” The new limb visibly gained mass as the rabbit thrashed but made no noise. Melati deftly avoided the animal’s attempts to bite her as she made her measurements._

_Another person walked into camera view. “Mel, take a look, we might have some Myxomatosis in the subjects.” He set a second rabbit on the table._

_“How retarded are you?” Melati snarled. “Get that plague-bearer-”_

_The scaled rabbit wriggled free of Melati’s grasp and leapt on the second animal. There was a spray of blood as scaley rabbit bit into the other rabbit’s neck. “Shit!” someone exclaimed. The camera kept running as the reptilian rabbit began ripping chunks of flesh out of the other rabbit and devoured them._

“Ms. Kusuma is the version of the serum which you used D-23?” Foggy asked when it was the defense’s turn to present their case.

“Of course not,” Melati scoffed. “Unlike most people, I am not deeply stupid. D-23 was discontinued after the incident in the video. I spent the next two years creating a version that didn’t increase aggressiveness. It also helped when I started monitoring changes to my test subjects’ digestive systems and taking more care to address any altered dietary requirements. Science is an experimental process, you learn by observing the results and adjusting your tests accordingly. Besides, humans are omnivorous by nature, I’m hardly going to go berserk because of a craving for meat, I just buy a steak for dinner.”

“What variant of the serum DID you use on yourself?” Foggy asked.

“K-15.”

“May I submit this video into evidence?” Foggy asked. Several minutes later the jury watched as a reptilian rabbit with four fully functional limbs made several confused attempts at grooming itself before giving up and heading over to the water bottle in a cage with four other normal rabbits. The other four rabbit avoided the strange hybrid creature in their midst but were not attacked by it.

* * *

“OsCorp does not and never has encouraged our scientists to experiment on themselves,” Harry told the reporters camped on his doorstep while the case underwent deliberation. “Ms. Kusuma’s project had a lot of promise, there was no threat to her funding. Obviously we couldn’t get approval to go ahead with human testing given her serum’s side-effects but given the improvements she’d already made we fully expected her to succeed, in time.

“Still, I can sympathize with her impatience, she’d already waited six years to be able to walk again- No, dance. She always had a picture of ballroom dancers hung up in her lab.” He looked directly into the camera and smiled, “Melati, once this nonsense is all straightened out I hope you know your job is still waiting and you'll be welcome back to resolve the remaining, superficial, issues with the serum.”

 

**Don't Judge a Book by it’s Cover**

===========================================================================  
The Daily Bugle                                                By: J. Jonah James                                                September 4, 2017  
===========================================================================

Today Ms. Melati Kusuma won her legal battle against her parents and their bigoted allies hiding among the well meaning people of the SHRA administration committee. She will be allowed to keep the use of her legs regardless of the unusual physical appearance that came with them. As part of the settlement, Ms. Kusuma has agreed to report to the Avengers for training to ensure her control over her enhanced abilities and to having regular appointments with a court assigned physiatrist for the next year to confirm what we should all know: People should not be judged on their physical appearance but on their willingness to openly stand up and do what is right. Ms. Kusuma, the Bugle wishes you all the best in your future endeavors.

* * *

“Odds are she’s going to be at the Academy for a long time,” Carol sighed, lean back in her chair across from Rhodes at a quiet restaurant. “Komodo never had issues with control over her powers but she can’t get a lease. The Osborn kid might not have a problem with her but her neighbors were another story. Graffiti on her door, threatening notes shoved through her mail slot, we had to move her out. The next two places we tried refused to lease to her and by that point the chip on her shoulder was visible from space.”

“So she stays at the Academy,” Rhodes said. “It was always intended to have people living there. We can refurbish the on-site lab to suit her. Tony built it for Bruce, hopping he’d come back someday, it’s been mothballed since the Compound opened it’s doors… Shit, I should have realized how wrong things had gone in the Avengers when Tony didn’t make a space for himself there.”

* * *

Wanda’s eyes followed the TV absently, her mind a thousand miles away from the day room in the psychiatric facility. The doctors at the facility were talking about discharging her from their care, the Accords committee was talking about bringing charges against her for her actions while she’d still been with HYDRA, for her involvement in Johannesburg. Her lawyer had explained that her time with the Avengers, Lagos and Leipzig might come up in discussions about the degree to which she’d reformed but that she wouldn’t be charged in those incidents because they were incidental beside the charges of terrorism and murder that lay in her past.

_“I changed, I was helping people. Wasn’t that enough?” Wanda had asked. “What else can I do? I SAVED lives in Lagos! It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t save everyone.”_

_“I wish I was defending you on just Lagos,” the lawyer sighed. “Rumlow brought the bomb and triggered it. You did what you could to contain the explosion. Rogers made the decision to ambush Rumlow in the middle of a crowd of civilians. The Sokovia Accords hadn’t been ratified at that point, while the Avengers’ presence in Lagos wasn’t strictly legal it was sufficiently accepted that one hundred and seventeen nations felt it was necessary to draft a whole new law explicitly stating that it was illegal. You, as the least experienced member of the team, were hardly in a position to question Roger’s tactical expertise. However your decision to go to Leipzig in defiance of the Accords while you were suspended pending a review of your part in Lagos hurts our argument that you’ve reformed and feel genuine remorse for the lives you took in the past when you refuse to accept public review of your actions even after your reformation.”_

_“But I didn’t know I was suspended or that my actions in Lagos might have validated!” Wanda cried. “No one ever told me!”_

_“And that would help your case more if Tony Stark weren’t a dead martyr for the Accords,” the lawyer said tiredly. “You stood by silently for a year while he took the blame for Johannesburg, now you want to claim your bad decisions about Leipzig are on him? While he’s not even alive to defend himself? Even though you played no role in Siberia or Steve Rogers’ decision to hide information about Howard and Maria Stark’s murder blaming him for anything you did won’t go over well.”_

_“I would have lied to him,” Wanda protested. “Even as much as I hated him then, I wouldn’t have lied about his parents. I know how I feel about my parents’ deaths.”_

_The lawyer shrugged, “Maybe so, but there’s still the matter of your actual involvement in Johannesburg, not to mention the years you spend with HYDRA. I’ll do the best I can to convince the jury that you don’t deserve to be punished because you’ve already reformed and are ready to be a contributing member of society now but you’ll find very few people who think ‘I’m sorry, I’ll do better in the future’ is sufficient when it’s a question of murder.”_

For a moment Wanda’s attention was captured by the screen. The current roster of Avengers was attending a charity ball, the camera followed the Lizard-Girl, Melati Kusuma, whom Wanda had briefly met just over a year ago as she was whirled about the dance floor an older gentleman while her teammates looked on, slack-jawed. “That’s how you dance, you heathens,” Melati declared, grinning and breathless as she was returned to her friends. “It’s called Quickstep.”

* * *

Sam and Steve both snapped to attention the moment a battle appeared on the TV screen, even after years in prison they both still had the instinct to rush to the rescue the moment they trouble brewing. They watched with baited breath as Komodo, one of the newest Avengers, matched up against an enhanced bank robber.

The criminal shot out vibrational blasts from gloves covering his hands while Komodo leapt and tumbled to dodge the blasts. “Are you trying to aim?” Komodo asked. “Here I am trying stay in front of concrete walls and shit that can take it when I dodge but you’re shooting cars on the other side of the street.” She lured the man in the quilted red and yellow costume after her until a group of police were able to capture him with a net.

The picture jumped to a reporter, “This was the scene in Brooklyn earlier today as one of the first of a new generation of heroes assisted the police to apprehend an Enhanced who had attacked an armored car. Komodo, Melati Kusuma is the first graduate of the Yinsen Academy to officially be recognized as a member of the Avengers. The Yinsen Academy was established in 2017 as a place for Enhanced Individuals to learn to control their powers and use them for the benefit of the world. Of the first graduating class, two of the five members are under-age and thus not eligible to serve in a combat position at this time. Two have resumed their previous lives having demonstrated that they possessed sufficient control over their abilities not to pose a danger to anyone around them. The fifth, Komodo, joins Spider-Man, the Defenders and Dr. Strange as the City of New York’s heroes, working closely with the Avengers, police and other law enforcement agencies to protect the public.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do think if Lagos happened in isolation, a proper review of the situation would exonerate Wanda of wrong-doing... And put the blame on Steve for his failure as the team leader to do anything secure the safety of civilians in the area while pursuing Crossbones.
> 
> Melati/Komodo is a character from "Avengers: The Initiative", a post-Civil War title that demonstrated the evils of having young heroes trained by the government by having the adults running the program act like complete morons or evil bastards. But while everyone in authority in the title was carefully crafted to be evil and/or stupid, I thought the kids were excellent characters. I plan to also include Terry Ward/Trauma as one of the next generation characters to show up in this series of stories.


	7. Born to be Bad

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the comics Terry Ward/Trauma gets his powers from his father being the demon Nightmare. I suppose with Dr. Strange demons are more possible in the MCU now but I’d rather not have actual demons cluttering things up.

Sam woke up to the unexpected sound of a group of people moving around in the hall outside his cell. A few months earlier an old enemy of Clint’s had managed to break into the prison, even without their gear they’d subdued the guy before the guards could get involved but it was a reminder that the prison wasn’t impregnable. If they’d ever really tried, odds were they could escape and there were people out there who had a beef with them and the skills to get in. Sam rolled on his side, eyes slitted and watched. 

A group of guards walked by escorting a new prisoner. Overwhelmed with curiosity Sam gave up the pretense of sleep. Thus far the four renegade Avengers had been kept isolated in a separate wing of the prison to avoid problems between them and the enhanced villains locked up there. Sam’s first impression of the new person was dyed black hair, a bowed head and rounded shoulders. ‘Young,’ Sam's mind supplied. Then he noticed the high-tech collar locked around the kid’s neck. It was sleeker than the one Wanda had worn in the Raft but Sam had no doubt that it served the same purpose.

The next morning a bell rang then the doors on their cells opened as normal. “Breakfast, get it while it's hot!” Scott announced cheerfully. Sam wondered if he was trying to will Steve and Clint into a friendly mood pollyanna-style. 

While the other three filed through the door to the small cafeteria Sam took a moment to lean into the newly filled cell. “The guards avoid contact with us when they can,” he explained to the kid who he now estimated to be sixteen or seventeen. “The cafeteria's locked except at meal times. When the door opens food’s waiting, and like Scott says, it’s best hot. The guards also leave newspapers and a selection of books in the cafeteria, you can take them back here if you like.”

The kid flinched at the sound of Sam’s voice, his hand came up to touch the collar around his neck but he didn’t look up or say anything so Sam kept talking. “We can stay in that room for about three hours before people start getting testy. If we don’t leave by then they’ll call on the intercom and order us back to this area.” Sam gestured in the opposite direction from the cafeteria door. There’s lounge with a TV and computer access that way, it’s open all day so are our cells. Lunch is at noon. After lunch the yard is open to us for two hours. At three the showers open for half an hour. Dinner’s at six. At nine we need to get back to our cells then they lock us in for the night. Repeat daily, with weekly visits from Doc Samson to break up the utter monotony with more same old, same old.”

“They told me,” the kid said dully. 

“Right, Sam Wilson.” Sam stuck out his hand, “Sorry, my manners are rusty.”

The kid started to return the gesture then drew back but not before Sam caught sight of the bandages around his wrist that had been hidden beneath the sleeve of his orange jumpsuit. 

“Why don’t we go get breakfast,” Sam said gentling his voice. “Give me a name and I’ll introduce you around.” 

“Terry, Terrance Ward,” the kid offered after a few moments. He got up and shuffled after Sam, his eyes never left the floor. 

Scott’s voice drifted out of the cafeteria as they approached the door. “I’m just saying five plates, four of us, it’s a mystery. We don’t get dinner guests ya’know.”

“Only to a moron,” Clint snapped. “They arrested someone else for violating the Accords. Knew it was only a matter of time.”

“So where is he?” Scott demanded.

“That’s our cue,” Sam said and putting a hand on Terry’s back ushered him in. “Hey guys, meet our new roommate, “Terry Ward. Terry, the grumpy one is Clint Barton.”

“Oh, can I be Happy?” Scott asked grinning. 

“No, if we’re going with a Seven Dwarves theme, first we’re three short, second you are totally Dopey,” Sam declared. Then to Terry he added, “Otherwise known as Scott Lang.” 

“Just for that I’m giving you Sneezy instead of Doc,” Scott pouted. 

“He’s a morning person,” Sam whispered to Terry as if revealing a dreadful secret. 

“Steve Rogers,” Steve introduced himself walking over and holding out his hand. Terry ducked back behind Sam. 

“Well we’ve got our Bashful now,” Scott offered and Clint slapped the back of his head. 

“So what’d you do? Stop a mugging without the proper paperwork?” Clint asked Terry who hunched in on himself as if he were trying to make himself vanish. 

“I thought you were Tony’s side now,” Steve said with an irritated glance at Clint and Scott banged his forehead against the table. “We were having a nice, pleasant breakfast,” Scott muttered.

Sam’s gaze strayed worriedly to Terry for a moment then he made a show of pulling out an imaginary scorecard, “Nope, Clint’s still mad at Tony for supporting the Accords instead of his friends. He’s mad at you for not realizing Tony was worried about a real threat when he made Ultron. He’s mad at Wanda for messing with our heads. He’s mad at Scott for talking more than Tony which no one even believed was possible. He’s mad at Nelson for not being about to produce a deal out of thin air now that he’s decided he doesn’t care about anything on principle. He’s mad at Samson for suggesting he ought to be mad at himself for at least a couple things... And now he’s mad at me, I hate being left out.” He grinned at Terry to show it was all teasing and pulled out chairs for both of them.

“Please ignore the quarreling,” Steve said apologetically. “We’re used to being able to DO something to fix it when things go wrong. Being told to sit and think about our mistakes without any avenue to make it better is, well crazy making.”

“Interpretation: Steve and Clint fight with each other because no one else cares if they weren’t entirely wrong about the Accords, Ultron, you name it,” Scott said without raising his head. “We fucked up badly enough that the world demands complete capitulation from us and no one cares that we- Well, by we I mean Steve- saw flaws, real flaws, in the the Accords. The Avengers that signed them knew they were flawed too. Colonel Rhodes, Hope, Hank, that Potts lady and the others spent the last year working their asses off to make the Accords better so we look like schmucks by comparison. Serious, how’d you end up in here? We need something new to talk about.”

“Let the poor kid eat,” Sam complained. “He doesn’t have to say anything if he doesn’t want to.”

“Thanks,” Terry said quietly as he sat down and dug in, never once looking up from his plate.

The others quickly gave up attempts at conversation. Scott took out a book of sudoku puzzles. Steve buried himself in a novel Foggy had recommended. Clint and Sam headed over to the table where the newspaper had been left, eyeing it and each other to see if there was going to need to be another quarrel about who got which section first. Almost at the same moment the two of them saw the headline. “Shit! Why are we in here instead of people like this psycho!” Clint exclaimed.

Steve and Scott looked up. Sam felt dread creeping up on him as Terry lowered his head even further until his nose was practically in his cereal bowl. 

“Some fucking lunatic used his powers to start a panic at a high school basketball game,” Clint explained quickly scanning the article for details. “Over a hundred kids hospitalized, twenty-three trampled to death. And shit like the Accords probably tying the hands of anyone in there who could have stepped up and done something. Hey, you, kid! What would you have done if you’d been there?” Clint demanded.

Finally Terry looked up, “If I could do it again?” he asked his eyes wild. “I’d shove the knife all the way to the bone.” 

Before anyone could say anything Terry lept up and ran out.

“He was there,” Sam said quietly. “I think he lost control of his powers and tried to kill himself to stop it.”

“Hell!” Clint exclaimed and ran after Terry. 

He found the boy sitting in the corner of his cell, picking at the bandages on his wrist. Clint restrained Terry’s hand easily. “Don’t listen to me, I talk a lot of shit without thinking it through,” he said.

“You weren’t wrong,” Terry replied. “Some people get cool powers that help people. I get the power to make your worst fear come to life, what does that say about me? I’m evil, I should be dead, I never should have been born.”

“What happened?” Clint asked. “Please?”

Terry shrugged. “Same old, same old. Some jackasses cornered me and started letting me know how much they didn’t appreciate people like me tarnishing the school’s reputation by existing. And then I turned into a monster. Everyone was running and screaming. At first I didn’t have a clue why, then I realized it was me. I just kept turning into worse and worse things. Like a real live boggart, except I was the monster. This girl… She couldn’t get away from me, her leg was broken or something and she… she… I had to make it stop.” He held up his arm, Clint could see old, pale scars peeking out from the edge of the bandage, criss-crossing Terry’s arm. “I thought I knew what I was doing but I didn’t cut deeply enough. Afterwards they told me I’m Inhuman.” Terry laughed brokenly, “Like I didn’t know that.”

Clint took Terry’s arm and started fixing his bandages. “Hell of an unfair way to find out you have powers,” he said when he was done.

* * *

“Why is he locked up in here?” Sam demanded during his next session with Dr. Samson. “He should be getting help, he should be on a suicide watch,” Sam added more quietly. “We’re keeping an eye on him during the day but he’s locked up alone in his room every night. What if he-”

There was a pinched look to Samson’s face as he answered. “The guards know to watch him, the collar monitors his vital signs as well as suppressing his powers.”

“But why is he here? Isn’t it obvious he wasn’t in control?” Sam demanded. “He needs help, not to be in prison.”

Samson took several moments to answer, “Can you think of what came up when Terry Ward’s case was reviewed by the SHRA board?”

Sam looked away, not wanting to hear how the precedent he’d helped to set was coming back to haunt the heroes of the future. 

“They talked about Berlin. The UN put you and Rogers in conference rooms trusting your honor to keep you there until the situation was sorted out and you escaped custody to destroy an airport. Now it’s all but impossible to keep any Enhanced who is arrested out of places like this during processing. A normal person doesn't have a choice about staying in a holding cell, I could knock down the wall and leave who's going to trust me not to after Berlin?”

“It’s not fair that kids who didn’t have anything to do with- with-” Sam stumbled, then sighed, “With us seeing the Accords as an obstacle to doing right by Barnes. Terry’s got nothing to do with us, he shouldn’t be penalized for it.”

“It’s not fair,” Samson agreed, “But how do you expect people to respond when the Avengers, who were widely considered the best representatives of what Enhanced, what heroes could be, blatantly set themselves above the law?

“They talked about Johannesburg, about Sudan, about the multiple skirmish caused by Ms. Maximoff’s use of her powers. About how anyone could force Terry to create another such incident by simply removing the collar. Putting him here isn't just about keeping him locked up, it's about keeping him out of the hands of people who would use him as a weapon.”

“Like the government won't,” Sam protested. “Ross might be gone but from what I've seen Talbots’ cut from the same cloth.”

“I could try to convince you that General Talbot is a better human being than Thaddeus Ross, that speaking with him doesn’t make my skin crawl but that’s not the point,” Samson said. “Most of the world agrees that, whether it’s a corrupt official like Ross or someone like Steve Rogers taking the law into their own hands, individuals without any checks on their power is a bad thing. It’s not about whether or not I trust a certain individual, the Accords and SHRA are about establishing a system with the checks and the transparency to prevent abuse. Concerns about how individuals might try to turn Terry’s power to their advantage are another reason Terry’s here, in a facility that is closely monitored by the UN for violations of the Accords. You have nothing on the Russians or the Chinese when it comes to being suspicious of the motives of United States’ generals.”

The former Air Force officer drew back, not knowing how to respond to hearing his opinion of his former superiors put on par with the opinions of hostile foreign governments. “Could you, I don’t know, talk to the guards?” hr asked after several moments. “If anything happened we might be able to get to Terry faster, all they’d have to do is unlock the doors and use the intercom. Or maybe he could share a room with someone?”

* * *

“Sam’s wrong about me,” Clint stated when he had his appointment with Samson, “About why I’m angry.”

Samson waited.

“I get why Steve had to put Bucky over the rest of us, I really do. It’s just a hard pill to swallow, that the team’s always gonna come in second to Steve’s old buddy,” Clint said. “Hell, it’s not like I could ask him to leave a guy he’s been friends with his whole life hanging… But there’s no one I’d have left the Avengers high and dry for, not even my family. It doesn’t feel quite right.

“But then I didn’t think there was a conflict between my family and the Avengers, not really. You know the whole Hawkeye, perfect vision thing? It’s crap, I’m farsighted, it makes me a better sniper but I should wear reading glasses, I don’t but I should. It’s not just literal either. I work best at a distance, when I get too close I fuck things up. Go out and kick bad guy ass so my family’s safe back at home? I can do that.” Clint grimaced, “Deal with typical kid-stupid stuff like poking into my gear and Lila wanting to make boys see her as older than she is? Not so much. So when Cap called, I thought he was giving me the chance to get back where I belonged, saving the world so my family would have a safe place to live. There wasn’t supposed to be a conflict. 

“I trusted Steve to be right, to do the right thing and I guess saving Bucky was the right thing for him but- Fuck, now Steve wants to say he didn’t know the right thing to do, he was just faking it because we needed him to be right all the time. I hate it when he does that, I think I could stomach him choosing Barnes because it was right easier but no he didn’t know what was right and we all made him pretend like he did. So what? Is it supposed to be my fault he lied to me about knowing what was best?” 

Clint frowned, “I wonder if Steve wasn’t already choosing Bucky over the team, over Tony back with Ultron. Steve knew if it came down to it Tony’d have to chose his parents over Barnes. So was him needing Tony gone to make sure the team’d be there for Barnes why Wanda trying to save people in Lagos and having it blow up in her face was a mistake but Tony trying to make Ultron to save people and having it blow up in his face was on Tony? His fault for keeping secrets from the team because Steve needed a reason to push him away before he brought Barnes in?

“And Tony, with the Accords? I guess I know that Tony didn’t choose a bunch of fucking suits over us even if feels like he did.” Clint’s face screwed up in disgust. “Tony put an idea over us, his flesh and blood friends. Feel like shit saying it cause he’s dead, but I don’t know if I could have ever forgiven that. And I don’t know that he could have, or should have ever forgiven what I said about Rhodes. A punch in the face sure but saying saying it was on him that his best friend ended up in a wheelchair…”

“So Tony Stark should have bowed to Steve Rogers’ opinion of what was right for the team?” Samson asked.

“What?” Clint asked, frowning in confusion. “When’d I say that?”

“You believe the Avengers should have stood together with respect to the Accords,” Samson said and Clint nodded. “Why should they have stood together behind Steve Rogers’ opinion that the Accords were completely unworkable rather than Tony Stark’s opinion that they could be amended into a healthy form of accountability?”

“Steve’s the Captain,” Clint said. “Tony can talk shit if he needs to but when it comes down to it the call’s Steve’s.”

“Even though you’ve said Steve Rogers was acting in the best interest of his friend rather than in the best interest of your team?” Samson asked. “And that Tony Stark was acting on what he believed was, theoretically, the best way for the your team to accomplish the Avenger’s mission of protecting humanity? You still feel the chain of command should be the deciding factor? Even when Tony Stark’s objections specifically dealt with believing that the Avengers should answerable to an external body?” 

“Steve did what was right for Barnes and Maximoff,” Clint said. “The people behind the Accords were out for their blood, I get that. It’s just- Steve wasn’t looking out for my family or Lang’s and he wasn’t looking out for Tony.” 

Clint shrugged, “So I’ve been practicing dealing with stuff that gets under my skin without losing my temper on Steve. If I mess up, worst thing that happens is I bruise my knuckles on his face. Negative reinforcement and he owes me right? But, um, I didn’t mean to catch that kid in the backlash. I didn’t hit him or any shit, but um, like with Tony, it’d probably be better if I had. I just didn’t - I didn’t pick up on him being involved in that Massachusetts school until I’d already run my mouth.” 

Samson rubbed his temples. “Picking fights with Steve is not how I’d recommend you work on anger management,” he groaned.

* * *

A few days later Sam found Terry sitting in a corner of the dayroom with both hands wrapped protectively around the power-suppression collar. “What’s wrong?” Sam asked. 

“Captain Marvel and the Vision say I can’t get out of here unless I’ll work on learning to use my powers,” Terry said. “I’ll kill myself before I use my powers again.”

“That’s never the answer,” Sam said automatically. 

“I heard on the news that the Vision took away that Witch-girl’s powers,” Terry as started talking faster he grabbed Sam’s arm. “I begged them to take my powers away. They’re evil. I don’t want them. I don’t want to be evil. But he wouldn’t do it.”

“He probably couldn’t,” Sam said slowly. “Wanda’s power came from experiments with the Mind Stone, the yellow gem in Vision’s forehead, that was why he could take them away from her.”

“That’s what he said.” Terry crumpled in on himself miserably. “I don’t want this, I don’t want to be some sort of monster.”

Sam caught Terry’s shoulders, crouching to look him in the eye, “Your powers don’t make you a monster Terry. That’s why Danvers and Vision want you to train with them, so you’re in control. You only hurt people because you didn’t know how to use your powers properly.”

“I read people’s fears then I turn into them,” Terry exclaimed. “How do you use that properly? How do I do anything but hurt people?”

Steve came in just in time to hear the last bit. “You’ll find a way,” he said with the rock solid certain Sam had almost forgotten he could project. It was startling to Sam to suddenly realize just how long it had been since he’d heard Steve sound sure of himself. ‘Since before Tony Stark died.’ 

“Your powers don’t make you good or evil, it’s up to you to find a way to use them for good,” Steve continued. “But you can’t do that if you let yourself be afraid of them.”

“Easy for you to say,” Terry snapped. “When you got powers it made you the peak of human potential, it made me into a walking nightmare. I traumatize people just by existing.”

Long after Terry had stormed off Sam sat there looking after him thinking about his abilities and how they might be used constructively. ‘They're never going to let him out of here if he won't try to get control over his powers,’ Sam thought.

* * *

Sam sat down across the dinner table from Terry and said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said, but even if you never want to use your powers wouldn’t it be better if didn’t have to depend on a restraining device to keep them under control?”.

“Yeah and when everything goes wrong and even more people die because of me that’s fine because I was trying,” Terry said bitterly. “I should just kill myself.”

Sam caught Terry’s shoulders and crouched a bit to force the teenager to look at him, “Terry, that is never the answer. Never.”

“Other people get exposed to the Terrigen contamination and they get speed or strength, I get the wonderful ability to turn into whatever the person looking at me fears. Doesn’t that say something about me as a person? Other people get the tools to help, if they want. All my powers can do is hurt, there’s no good reason for doing what I do,” Terry insisted.

“Counseling, helping to people to face their fears in a controlled environment,” Sam said quickly. “It’s a recognized therapeutic technique. If you had full control over your abilities then you could completely eliminate the uncontrollable variables from exposure therapy. Look, why don’t you use your powers on me, I think it will help both of us.”

It took Sam several weeks to talk Terry around, but all he had was time. Terry only agreed after Sam had talked Samson into getting the guards into restraining both of them on opposite sides of a locked cell before they removed the lock on Terry’s collar. 

The guards walked out and shut the door behind them leaving Terr and Sam alone. “Okay Terry,” Sam said. “You can take it off. Nothing bad is going to happen. I can’t hurt you, you can’t hurt me. Just use your power, show me what I’m afraid of… Then turn it off, yourself, without relying on the collar.”

Terry shook his head. “You don’t understand what I do. The people in that gym, I didn’t hurt them I made them hurt themselves.”

“They panicked, they trampled each other,” Sam said. “It’s just you and I and we’re both restrained. No one’s going to get hurt.”

“She clawed her eyes out!” Terry exclaimed. “There was one girl, her leg got smashed or something when everyone was trying to get away from me. She couldn’t run, I tried backing away from her but I couldn’t leave, couldn’t go out where there were even more people. She just stared at me and screamed and screamed, then she started scratching at her face until her eyes were gone and she didn’t have to look at me anymore.”

Sam swallowed, “I’ve been there,” he said. “Wanda used her powers on me and yours don’t sound as bad as hers. She went into your mind, put you into whatever your worst fear was. Your powers pull my fear out and put it on display right? To my thinking that’s a lot less immersive. I can handle that, I’ve dealt with worse. You need to do this, you need to know that even if that collar breaks down you’ll still be in control.”

Terry nodded reluctantly then leaned forward and, working awkwardly around the limits of his restraints, removed the collar. He sat up and took a few deep breaths then finally made eye contact with Sam. For a moment nothing happened. Then Terry morphed and Captain America was sitting in his place, complete with the shield. “Oh come on Sam, you don’t need this kid’s magic to show you what you’re afraid of. You say you respect Stark for getting mental help but you follow me because I’m good at hiding my problems. What good did therapy do you anyway? It didn't get your wings back. I did that because when you follow me you're guaranteed to be right.”

Then he was Tony, a shot-glass in hand. “I screw up, everyone knows that. Follow me and I'll expect you to reel me in when I go wrong but how can you do that? You couldn't even protect your best friend.”

Then Sam was facing someone who was both Riley and Rhodes, “I knew the risks, I don’t regret following my convictions. But what about you Sam? Are you following your beliefs or are you just echoing Steve’s?”

And he was Captain America again, “I’m just a simple guy from Brooklyn, I never claimed to be perfect. But anyone who questions me is obviously wrong, I'm Captain America. I was right in WWII, I was right in Lagos and I'll always be right in the future. Anyone who thinks they're qualified to second guess my decisions is delusional… And probably a Nazi.”

Back to Riley, “I do have one regret. After I died you turned into a hypocrite and a coward Sam. You couldn’t even get back on your feet without using Captain America as a crutch. If there was any justice in the universe you’d have died instead of me that day.”

Then he was Terry again, gasping slightly. “I’m sorry,” he said staring at the floor. His shoulders were tense from the strain of holding back his powers and he looked like he expected to be hit.

“No,” Sam said with a shaky smile. “You did good… I, I was expecting the more visceral stuff. Watching Riley fall.”

Terry grimaced. “I kept telling myself that I was safe. In the gym the more scared I got the stronger my powers got. I thought maybe the opposite would be true as well, if I could keep from being scared that my powers would be weaker.” 

“See, you’re figuring it out already,” Sam said forcing a positive lilt into his voice.

* * *

Several days later Sam unexpectedly found himself sitting across a table from James Rhodes. Somehow seeing Rhodes in the prison interview room was entirely different from seeing him in the armor in Sudan. “I'm sorry,” Sam blurted out unable to tear his eyes away from the wheelchair Rhodes sat in. 

“What for?” Rhodes demanded, the bluntly stated question was anything but rhetorical.

At his tone Sam finally, guiltily dragged his gaze away from the wheelchair, feeling that Rhodes wouldn't react well to an apology for his injuries. “I’m sorry I forgot that we were a team back then,” he said after a few minutes. “I acted like you and Tony were the enemy, like you wouldn't have cared about a threat to the world then Tony turned around and proved I was wrong by going to help Steve even after you got hurt fighting us. Fighting a battle that never should have happened.”

Rhodes nodded in acknowledgment. “I wanted to thank you for getting Terry to work on controlling his powers,” he said. “That was the sticking point on getting him out of here. After Johannesburg the idea of someone like Terry running around with only a device to control his abilities wasn't acceptable to the committee.” Rhodes grimaced, “I could tell them a hundred times that we'd keep him safe at the Compound but with him refusing to even try to learn control… They look at him like a hand grenade just waiting for some bad guy to come along and pull the pin. But now that he's making an effort I've got the leverage to put him under observation at our school instead of a prison.”


	8. Getting to Work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha's given her role in the war to come.

“Agent Romanov!” Hill called. “Mission briefing.”

Natasha nodded and followed her upstairs to one of the secure conference rooms. “Director Fury, have a nice vacation?” she asked. A small widening of her eyes the only visible indication of surprise when she saw the one-eyed man sitting at the head of the table.

“Educational,” Fury replied with a frown. “Gotta say, coming home was even more so. Imagine my surprise when it turns out that the biggest wild card on my hand picked team turns out to be the only one of you who has any clue of when to dig his heels in and when to bend. And now he's dead.”

Natasha looked down. There had been a time when she had argued that Tony had been the one with too much ego to bend but she'd come to understand that Leipzig hadn't been about bending to the will of the group but to the will of the world.

“Thank the gods for Rhodes, if not for him staying the course even after being crippled by your stupidity there wouldn't be any Avengers today. Instead he learned from your fuck-ups and the Avengers are stronger than ever.”

“If that's the case, may I ask what the Director wants with me?” Natasha said stiffly. “Unless you just stopped by to dress me down.”

“I don't need the Avengers today,” Fury replied. “I need an infiltrator who can spotlight sabotage sites for a follow up team.”

“Since the Avengers I'm too well known for undercover work,” Natasha reminded him.

“The icing on the cake is it's not on Earth,” Fury said with an unkind grin. “You didn't want to be subject to questioning about the collateral damage you cause and now no one wants you working in their neighborhood…. Meaning the planet. I've done the preliminaries, humanoids are common enough out there for you to pass. I put together a team to go in with you. Speaking of….”

The other door to the conference room opened. Lady Sif of Asgard walked in followed by a slender young man with scars across his face, obscured by the long, mousy brown bangs falling into eyes. He twitched nervously when he felt Natasha’s eyes on him. “Lady Natasha,” Sif greeted her. “I look forward to fighting alongside you.” She nodded toward her companion, her expression turned disapproving. “This is Vali, Loki taught him Realm-walking before his fall.”

“Sif’s muscle, Vali’s transportation and you’re the one with the eyes to know what I’m looking for,” Fury said. “Thanos is coming here? Well we’re not sitting around and waiting. This Realm-Walking is apparently an all but unheard of art, practiced almost exclusively by Loki. Vali can only promise to put you in the middle of Thanos’ empire, you’ll have to arrange conventional transportation for yourself from there. But the Guardians of the Galaxy have agreed that we can use their ship and are arranging additional small courier class crafts. We will be able to get strike teams in and out of Thanos’ territory within the year. When that time comes you’re going to have fed us information on the best place to throw some clogs.” 

“Sir? Can I have a few days to think this over and to get to know my prospective team?” Natasha asked.

Fury nodded, “Seeing as how poor teamwork and a lack of trust destroyed the last team you were on, I’d recommend it.”

* * *

Talking Sif into going drinking was one of the easiest things Natasha had ever done. Sif had been so delighted at the prospect of going out with another female warrior that Natasha invited Maria Hill along at the last moment so Sif would have one ‘Shield-Sister’ to socialize with who didn’t have ulterior motives. 

After several tankards Sif leaned back in her chair. “The Avengers held a special place in Thor’s heart. Oft times I find myself thinking when he mourns Man of Iron, a part of him is mourning the dissolution of his team as well,” she said. “How did such a famed band of warriors come to such an inglorious end?” 

Natasha hesitated, not knowing what to say. Maria didn’t. “Arrogance,” she said, her words slurring slightly after trying to keep up with an Asgardian’s drinking for more than one round. Then she turned to Natasha, “You know, no one realistically expected the Accords to turn the lot of you into a bunch of mindless automatons that just did what you were told. Never in his life did Rogers ever respect a chain of command that didn’t start with him. Tony Stark was Tony Stark, he blew off a Senate hear and managed to get the audience cheering him on. Thor’s an alien prince who was considered a god by our ancestors. Bruce Banner? The Hulk?” Maria snickered. “Even you and Clint were notorious for your creative takes on the concept of following orders. But you used to get it. You and Clint played fast and loose with the rules when you had to but you used to understand the game: Standing in middle of the hanger while Fury torn a strip out of your hide. Filling out reams of paperwork for Coulson explaining yourself. Suffering through those miserable scut work missions you’d get assigned after the big violations so the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t feel like you guys got special treatment. And when you did make the wrong call you accepted the shorter leash with good grace and worked your butt off to earn back the trust you'd lost.

“There’s a difference between breaking the rules when you have to, when you can step up and explain exactly why the rule needed breaking that exact moment, and telling the whole world that the rules simply don’t apply to you. The bulk of the Sokovia Accords weren’t even asking you to submit to new regulations, they were just asking you to publically acknowledge the existence of laws you'd been routinely breaking. It’s not a violation of your freedom to ask you to recognize that you can’t go marching into someone else’s house, or their country, without their permission! Your rights don’t include the freedom to trample on other people’s rights, they never did. You forgot that. The United Nations asked Rogers to show that he did recognize that he’s not above the law and he blew them off. Got too big for your britches the lot of you.” Maria threw back the last fourth of her mug and swayed alarmingly as the motion upset her precarious balance. 

Sif and Natasha both reached out to stabilize her. Once Maria was secure on her barstool Sif glanced questioningly at Natasha. “She's not wrong,” Natasha sighed. “We always meant well and I stand by most of the decisions we made up thru Lagos... But we didn't stand by our decisions. We didn't stand up and explain why what we did was necessary, we just expected people to accept that, because it was us, it was the right decision. And when they didn't accept it we got offended.”

“You are answerable to these people?” Sif asked.

“Yeah,” Natasha said. “Maybe not for every decision but ultimately, when things went wrong in a public way, we’re answerable to the people.”

“Odd,” Sif said. “On Asgard we are answerable to the All-Father, for those of lower rank perhaps through their superiors, but ultimately we answer to him. Should he find our answers unsatisfactory there would be consequences, even for his heir. Thor was briefly banished when Odin consider his actions too reckless and headstrong to be tolerated.”

Natasha nodded and let it drop. “So this Vali, you said he was Loki’s student?” she asked letting her voice fill with skepticism.

Sif grimaced. “The All-Father says Vali can be trusted.”

“But?” Natasha pressed.

“He’s a conniving, deceitful…” Sif broke off. She took a deep breath. “It's not that I don't understand. When I first started training as a warrior you cannot imagine the number of times I was told that I should go home and tend to my looks.”

“Seriously?” Maria asked. “I've decked people for much less.”

“I did much the same and eventually they learned to worry more about my fists than my face,” Sif said. “There is little that is considered appropriate for a high-born lady without the spark of magic. It was a struggle to convince anyone that I could do more than marry and bear future warriors for the glory of Asgard.”

“Idiots, all of them,” Maria sympathized and Natasha nodded wishing Sif would get back to Vali.

“If I'd had magic I would have been absorbed into the technical class regardless of my birth,” Sif said leaving her audience to wonder if All-speak could glitch. “If I'd had the ability I might have been content with that and never realized my abilities as a warrior.”

“So Vali had magic? And he wanted to be a warrior instead of joining the, um, ‘technical class’?” Natasha asked.

Sif snorted, “Hardly. When he and his brother came to Asgard from Vanahiem, Narfi joined the guard like a respectable man, Vali disguised himself as a woman and studied magic. We used to think it was cute the way ‘she’ always followed Loki about like a besotted kitten, we thought ‘she’ had a crush, but it turned out Loki was teaching Vali his tricks.”

Natasha and Maria traded a puzzled look. “Vali had magic and wanted to learn to use it… And that was bad?” Natasha asked.

“I'd have respect for him if he'd walked up and demanded to be trained in magic despite his gender instead he lied and hid his nature.” A distasteful look crossed Sif’s face. “But what else can you expect from someone who would use magic to fight?”

* * *

“Well?” Fury asked.

“Sif will have a constant eye on Vali and a hand on her sword to take him out at the first sign of betrayal. Which isn't all bad because the only person on Asgard who's done anything to win the guy’s loyalty is Loki. I wouldn't exactly blame Vali if he turns out to be harboring a secret desire to screw Asgard over to avenge Loki's death,” Natasha reported.

Fury gave her a dark look, “Are you refusing the mission Agent Romanov?”

“I want someone there who I can trust to watch my back,” Natasha said. “You know who.”

“He’s in jail,” Fury pointed out. “And can you really trust him to have your back?”

“We didn't have any differences that haven't been resolved. Clint's eligible for parole in six months, don't tell me that you can't swing a measly half year. And like you said, the Accords committee gets to ship us off planet.”

“That will sweeten the deal,” Fury agreed. “Barton needs to sign or the Accords committee won't even discuss working with him.”

“He'll sign,” Natasha said.

“And walk away from his family for a mission that is likely to keep him away for a year minimum? I hear Nathan wasn’t walking the last time he saw the kid.”

* * *

“Clint, I can deal with your absence, I’ve been dealing with you being gone since our honeymoon was cut short for a mission. I can't deal with your resentment,” Laura said.

“What do you mean?” Clint asked, his heart in his throat.

Laura sighed, “If I told you your family needed you I'd be lying. If something happened Natasha and I had asked you to stay with us, would you blame me? Us?”

Clint started to protest then sighed, “This is probably the only way they're going to let me make a difference in what's coming. Maybe just the best way for me to make a difference. I want to protect you guys.”

“I know,” Laura said. “I told you before, I'm not the type to run. Take care of Nat. Save the world. We'll be here when you get back.”

* * *

Clint looked at the other three renegades Avengers and didn't know what to say. 

Scott rolled his eyes, “What? You forgot you had the shortest sentence? Stop feeling guilty, you weren't at Bucharest, Berlin or-” he glanced at Steve and decided not to mention Siberia. “Or have my priors. You were always getting out first.”

“It still feels wrong,” Clint said. It felt disloyal to leave his friends, his team behind but not leaving meant letting Natasha go undercover with a team she couldn’t trust to look out for her. 

“You’re not good company,” Sam pointed out with a small grin meant to take the sting out of it. 

Steve stepped forward and offer Clint his hand, “Take care of yourself and Natasha out there,” he said seriously.

Clint grinned suddenly. “Don’t go writing me off yet,” he said. “Maybe Nat and I got spoiled doing this Avenger gig and being famous but in S.H.I.E.L.D.? Every agent is expendable, everyone eventually gets a mission with no exit plan. Between the two of us Nat and I did a hundred of those so called suicide mission and every time we nailed it and came back for more. That’s what made the two of us legendary at S.H.I.E.L.D. They’ve got other snipers, other undercover specialists, but Nat and I are fucking weeds. Budapest? They gave us a funeral after Budapest, didn’t stop Nat and I from walking into Fury’s office two weeks later. So, outer space? Crazy ass Darkside Empire that needs taking down? Maybe I’m a lousy husband and a worse father. The only political statement I’ll ever make is going be from behind a sniper scope… And only on someone else’s order. But this? Nat and I, we can do this.”

* * *

Clint was flown directly from the prison to an isolated S.H.I.E.L.D. base in Montana where he joined the rest of the team as they boarded a compact, heavily shielded hovercraft. Vali took the controls, “I won’t be able to get there in one jump,” he apologized, His long, light brown hair falling forward to hide his face from them. And then they were in the air. 

Vali flew like a madman, sending the ship into twists and turns for no reason the instruments could detect and sometimes flying straight through things that all Clint’s senses, not to mention the plane’s, swore were solid. Twenty, forty minutes, brief glimpses other places, other realities. Then they were spit out, landing. And Vali’s hair was plastered to his face with sweat. “Four hours then we go again,” he told them. “Don’t go outside.”

Natasha cupped her hand against a porthole for a moment. “No danger of that,” she said. “What is this place?” 

Sif did the same thing then shrugged. “It could be any one of hundreds of planets in the space around Midgard. There was a particularly virulent war, oh twenty thousand years back.” 

Clint couldn’t resist, as Vali stood up and made his way to the bunks at the back of the ship, the archer slid past him to get a good look outside through the pilot’s viewpanel. He saw an alien city, slowly crumbling into ruin. It took several more minutes for him to pin down quite why this dead city was so very disquieting but then he got it. There were mummified carcases scattered about, people or animals he wouldn’t venture to guess, but they’d died where they’d fallen. There was no evidence of scavenger activity or- “Why aren’t the bodies out there rotting?” he asked.

“The bacteria on this planet died at the same time as everything else,” Sif replied. “One of the planet-killing weapons used in the war poisoned the atmosphere, rendering a planet incapable of sustaining life in a few hours. There were other weapons that cracked a planet’s mantle or ripped away the atmosphere. There were even weapons that would poison a system’s star, if we were to pass too close to systems where that weapon was used, this ship would become a floating tomb. It wasn’t enough for the warring peoples to kill each other, they wished to render any where their enemy had lived incapable of sustaining life forever after.”

“Razed and salted, so that it would never again be built up,” Natasha said quietly.

Sif nodded. “As the war approached Midgard it triggered the great unification of Yggdrasil. We feared that the horrible malignance of the weapons they favored would be such that it would spread along the axis of the World Tree, so banded together, even Muspelheim sent aid to drive the war back from Midgard’s shores. They turned this area, once thriving with life and trade as it was the junction of two lobes of the galaxy, into a wasteland.”

They remained on the dead planet until Vali had his nap, then they took off again. There were two more stops, on similarly lifeless planets before they found themselves on a mountain looking down at a vast sprawling city. The mountain had been carved into the image of a massive being seated on a throne, glowering down at the city sprawled at his feet. Vali had landed their ship in the crevasse beneath the titanic statue’s multi-clefted chin. 

Natasha looked down at the city below. “Guess it’s time to get to work,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The names Vali and Narfi come from a particularly disturbing bit of Norse Mythology: Then were taken Loki's sons, Váli and Nari or Narfi; the Æsir changed Váli into the form of a wolf, and he tore asunder Narfi his brother. And the Æsir took his entrails and bound Loki with them over the three stones.
> 
> In my story they aren't Loki's kids but...


End file.
